It was early June when I looked up from my hoeing and saw a ghost coming toward me.
Ever since Sara died, I had took care of the flower beds she used to love, and that morning I was hoeing away, thinking about Lafe, about how you could spy him half a mile away, walking in from the fields or from hunting, with that red hair of his that looked so much like Daddy’s in the old pictures. I always looked more like Momma, who was a Geddie.
The ghost was maybe a hundred yards away, which is about all the far I can see anymore. It was walking kind of tired, like it was climbing uphill. It had a sack on its back, throwed over its shoulder and held with one hand, the other arm swinging free to help it get through the sand in the old rut road. Lafe had surely come back, was surely coming home with some Irish potatoes he’d dug out of the hill for Momma.
“Looks like you got enough taters there to last us all winter,” I said to Lafe’s ghost. By now, it was close enough, maybe fifty feet away, for me to see that the hair was different. It was short, like Lafe’s, but it was spikier, rougher looking.
“What in the world have you done to your hair?” I asked the ghost, leaning on the hoe handle to keep from falling.
The ghost stopped five feet from me and said, “Granddaddy, are you all right?”
It was Justin, my grandson.
He set down this bag, the one I’d thought was full of potatoes, and said he’d come to visit me. He looked like he’d been rode hard and hung up wet. I reckon I took a little while to shift gears and get my poor addled brain back to the real world. Finally I asked him what in the world he was doing in East Geddie, and where his momma was, and then I remembered that she was in Europe somewhere.
Justin reached out to shake my hand. He’s near-bout grown, must be at least six foot two, but he don’t weigh more than 150 pounds. Him and me never seemed like we had all that much in common, and it struck me as queer that he was telling me he’d just decided to come down for a visit, with Georgia in Europe and all. But he appeared to need some looking after.
“I reckon we better get you something to eat,” I told him. “You look about half starved. Come on in the house.”
I took some biscuits out of the freezer, wrapped them in tinfoil and put them in the toaster oven, then got some ham out of the refrigerator and started frying it in the skillet. We had three more jars of Sara’s peach preserves left, so I got some of them down, then got some apple jelly. I hadn’t done much entertaining here lately, so I was just reaching for anything that might of been good to eat. Lord, I don’t know what-all they eat up in Virginia.
I found some cold fried chicken left over from some Jenny had brought me. I offered to warm up some collards, knowing Justin thinks about as much of them as I do, just to try and get him to smile.
We set down at the big old dining-room table where eight of us used to eat three meals a day, and Justin started to spear a couple of pieces of ham with his fork. I reckon he noticed that I hadn’t moved yet, and he remembered where he was.
“Would you like to ask the blessing, Justin?” I asked him.
“No thank you, Granddaddy,” he said.
I bowed my head.
“Kind heavenly father, bless this meal we are about to partake of, and bless our loved ones here and abroad, that they may come back to us safely. Amen.”
I opened my eyes and saw Justin staring from across the table.
“Well, go ahead,” I told him. “It’s blessed. Dig in.”
• • •
Daddy’s name was John, and everybody called him Red John. He lost a leg somewhere in Virginia, maybe in the Wilderness Campaign. By the time he married Momma, he was forty-nine years old. Momma’s name was Faith Geddie, and she was Daddy’s third cousin’s daughter, which wasn’t considered peculiar at that time. What was unusual was that she was just twenty-three and had already lost one husband, to the flu, three years earlier. They say that when her husband died, his folks sent her back with six hogs and twenty dollars. So I reckon she was happy to accept Red John McCain’s offer.
Lex and Connie was born first. Daddy, who got to choose all the first names, named them Lexington and Concord, which was funny names, even for around here. You couldn’t hardly tell that they was twins. Since they was boy and girl, they weren’t hardly identical. The year after, they had another boy, John Geddie McCain after my daddy. He died when he was three weeks old. Gruff was born in 1898. His real name is Cerrogordo, after a battle in the Mexican War. Lord knows what possessed Daddy to name him that. They say he got his nickname because he had a pouty look to him all the time, and one time an old aunt said, “What a gruff young-un you are!” and it stuck, the way things like that will. I think anybody named Cerrogordo would be glad to be named Gruff.
Because Century was born in 1900, that was her name. Another baby, a girl, was born dead the next year. Then, in 1903, Momma had Lafe. Daddy named him after the Marquis de Lafayette. Marquis de Lafayette McCain. He was real happy to be called Lafe.
I come last. They said Daddy wanted to name me John Geddie McCain, but Momma wouldn’t let him, since it would insult the memory of her dead baby. Up to this point, she was in charge of middle names, and maybe to offset some of Daddy’s foolishness, she give every one of her children the same middle name: Geddie.
“Besides,” she’s supposed to of told Daddy, “how are you going to explain to this baby how come there’s a tombstone out there in the graveyard with his name on it?”
Daddy thought about it for a spell, and they say I didn’t have any name a-tall for several days. Finally, Daddy told the rest of the children that he had the perfect name. Considering his record to this point, I’m sure Momma was uneasy.
“We’ll call him Littlejohn,” he told Momma and them.
They said Momma only asked him one question: “One word or two?”
I reckon after Lexington, Concord, Cerrogordo, Century and Marquis de Lafayette, she didn’t think Littlejohn Geddie McCain was all that bad a name.
Aunt Mallie delivered me. She was ninety-seven years old, and she had delivered Daddy, too. She was living in the same old slave cabin her husband, Zebediah, and Captain McCain, who was my granddaddy, built over sixty years before, right after the captain married into the Geddies and got his land and slaves. She lived to be 104. Two days after her funeral, Daddy and them went down to the cabin, and all her family, nieces and nephews and what-all, had left. They never come back.
Aunt Mallie read fortunes. Momma didn’t hold to such foolishness, but all us young-uns sneaked away at one time or another to have Aunt Mallie look at our palms and tell our futures. Century and Lafe sneaked me down to her place one day when I was five, so I reckon she was 102 years old.
She still dipped snuff, and I can remember the whole cabin smelling like it. She took my palm in her big old wrinkled hand and studied it real hard. She shook her head while Century and Lafe giggled behind her. She was about deaf, so I don’t reckon she minded. I never forgot what she told me.
“You got a hard road, boy,” she said. She spoke so low I couldn’t hardly hear her. “I see real bad times, but then I see a whole lot of happy times. Don’t be giving up on the good times. They be coming. The Lord Jesus is got some surprises in store for you, to be sure.”
I don’t reckon anybody ever give Aunt Mallie enough credit.