8

Subterranean Worlds

The summer was winding itself down. I’d always liked that place between seasons, a time that had always before been about knowing where I was and not knowing where I’d be next. Now the highways west I’d imagined before coming to Knoxville made me think of spirals of dust vanishing over a horizon. I tried not to name it, the ache I felt inside as Willy’s tall shelves filled up with bird skulls that claimed Outer Mongolia, wooden flutes labeled Ecuador. We were only weeks away from being finished with the renovations. We ducked under ropes, stumbled on plastic drop cloths and half-full cans of paint, all signs of final touches ahead. Always before, I’d save little souvenirs of a place I’d been, reminders I wouldn’t throw away when I left. Menus and junk store price tags. Lately, even peeled-off labels took up too much space.

I stayed late that Thursday afternoon reading up on towns with names like Wind and Rain, Wyoming, and Silky Falls, Idaho. Marvis Temple had assigned me a Willy’s display that had been begun some time back but never completed—towns with reputation for their ghosts—and I’d been doing my research. The town called Wind and Rain, so articles said, had storms where the wind was like the forlorn cries of abandoned children, while in Silky Falls the entryway to a cave had been found behind the town’s namesake waterfall. In the cave were the bones of two women missing for a dozen years, but investigators had been able to remove only scraps of cloth and buttons from their clothing. When we tried to gather the bones, the article read, the air filled with intolerable weeping.

There were some boxes down in the basement I might find of use, Marvis had told me. “Plenty of leads about ghosts from Emissaries before you, if you find the right box.” She’d given me a key to the basement’s padlock, but I hadn’t been down yet. Basements in general had always had an aura of spiders and mold to me, let alone what the basement of Willy’s might hold. But now, just as I finished the last of the articles I’d printed, I felt the itch and shiver in my ear I hadn’t felt for a while. Ruby’s voice.

Ghosts, she said. She seemed to be laughing. I reckon ghosts are as good a place as any to begin.

I bit my lip, put the articles in the file I’d started, and began to gather my things, but Ruby whispered again, louder this time.

Ghosts and things can leave a trail mighty curious if you’d just take a look.

I sighed and laid my hands over my ears. She was haint enough and plenty.

Ghost stories, she said. Why, they’re the least of it.

So I found myself putting on my sweater and heading downstairs, past the shark tank, around two more corners, past towers of crates, past a bathroom with an open door and a sink on its side, its gutted pipes littering the tile. Just past that was a crooked panel in a wall with a padlock. “The lock’s a little stiff,” Marvis had told me, “but jiggle it, and the panel’s easy enough and you’re in.”

My only flashlight was the one on my key ring, and I shone it down some steep wooden steps, letting my eyes adjust. It was damp as a vault with something unnamed buried in it, and already I could smell the creepiness. I made way my down and stood feeling the damp through the soles of my shoes as I aimed the little flashlight toward the ceiling, located a chain, and pulled it. What was likely a rat skittered off. The subterranean space took shape.

The one bulb lit a room piled to the nines. Narrow windows near the ceiling proved there was an outside, but it was late-day and a dusty light had draped itself over the boxes that were everywhere. My eyes adjusted more, and I made out stencils and stamps and scribbled codes. Fragile. G33. Sitting atop the boxes were some of the Willy’s Wonderama oddities themselves. A dull-feathered bird with two heads, wired to the top of a box as tall as myself. A mangy cat as big as a Great Dane, the thin fur spotted with gray, naked areas of hide. There were plenty more things with extra legs, missing wings, and dozens more dated boxes. I was standing in the middle of leftover wonders, all the things that had survived Willy’s fires. I lifted the top off a file box of photos. A black-and-white one of a hand with a large stone in its palm: Moon Rock Found in Back Yard. A girl with a long, thin neck and a smile so shy I wanted to cover her face: Alice in Our Times. Another photo of twins, their webbed fingers joined in a coffin large enough for two.

I made my way past shoulder-high stacks of books that looked like they’d seen floodwaters. One storeroom gave way to another, and I ducked through a round stone arch of a doorway into a yet another room smelling of pine straw. More skittering. A tiny, high-pitched animal sound. I trained my light on box atop box, these with inscriptions. Moon Stones, Outer Reaches Beach, 1982. Facial Reconstruction Plates, Eastern Shore Tribal Centers. The place was rife with ghosts. Behind the boxes the glass eyes of birds and foxes and things with no names watched me.

I felt around for a switch that spilled more weak light into the shadows. I thought I could hear faraway footsteps from overhead in the museum rooms as I breathed in, out, in. Silence. Boxes on a shelf with dates. 1899. 1872. 1839.

If you want to know who you are, you might just find a clue here you can use. Ruby’s voice nearly licked my ear as I scanned box label after box label. Flood Records, 1946. Stars and Planets, 1927. Secret Desert Military, 1901. My eyes settled on one that read Small-Town Ghosts: Towns N–T. I pulled up a crate and took a seat, lifted the lid on that box.

You’re heading in the right direction, she said as a scent of mothballs and flower petals flooded my nose.

I turned the beam of my key-ring flashlight on folders inside the box, those too labeled. The first one was Nickelback, West Virginia. An envelope containing photos of empty houses and a body of water. Ghost town submerged, the envelope read, beneath lake made by power company. Another photo was a shot of an elegant building’s skeleton. On the back of that photo was a short, handwritten notation: Apparition seen in early morning on the porch of this famous home. Another envelope. National Bank of Nickelback, 1938. A photo of an open bank vault and the handwritten line Ghosts of famous outlaws said to revisit Nickelback bank on the anniversary of shootout. I sat reading folder after folder as the names of towns amazed me—Piquant, Tennessee; Quietude, Kentucky—and I felt the ghosts these towns named hovering near me as the light from the small basement windows deepened into evening.

You be patient, now. You’re headed home, Miracelle. Ruby’s voice was soft, and I had to strain to hear it. Home, she said? What home was that? The homes I’d had with my mother had been roadside motels. Juke joints. Apartments for rent by the week. And my idea of home was none too high and mighty. A few mementos set out and a thumb-tacked postcard or two. Home, I’d always told myself with what passed as hard-won knowledge on the fly, was where my heart was at any given minute. You don’t know what you’re looking at yet, girl. Ruby’s voice was lonely as a fog on a river.

I picked through other folders piece by piece, town by town. Rosebloom, Ohio. Smyte, Kentucky. There were photos of women in coveralls on the steps of a boardinghouse where an enormous woman had visions and laid on hands. And in Thurmond, West Virginia, were coal cars spewing soot and beside the tracks children so gaunt they could have been haints kneeling to gather slag.

I never had the words to give you, Miracelle, Ruby said as I looked through folder after folder. You and me, we were haunted right enough. But I never knew how to tell you about the past. Her voice grew small.

Then I came to an “R” folder, misfiled but labeled with the name of a town I kind of recognized, a name that warmed me in the damp basement air. Radiance. I traced my fingers over the letters and imagined spirits in a town with that name. Ghosts the size of fireflies or ones like the aftertaste of whiskey. The name was familiar, the more I thought about it. What had Maria Murdy said? A town with a name like light. As I rifled through the contents of the folder, Radiance had hauntings aplenty. There was an article from a book about a variety of Radiance ghosts. A shut-down five-and-dime where the ghost of a salesgirl was said to wander the aisle, winding up all the jewelry boxes. Foreclosed businesses haunted by their former owners. One photo showed some dead man with sunken cheeks and a note on its back read: Wince Turner still visits his homeplace.

Then, mid-folder, there was a stapled group of papers that I almost flipped past, thinking it was one more ghost story. Right there, Ruby said, her voice as excited as I could ever remember it.

On the front of the stapled papers was a blank sheet bearing a label with a tiny fiddle in its corner and what seemed to be a personal note. Shaun, it read, for you and your love of songs and ghosts. A ballad. Below that, in delicate handwriting, was a verse to the ballad called “Long Black Veil.” She walks these hills in a long black veil / She visits my grave when the night winds wail / Nobody know, nobody sees / Nobody knows but me. Above me in the museum more footsteps sounded, quick ones that died away as I flipped to the next piece of paper. That was a news clipping. This is what we came down here for, Ruby whispered. Part of what you always wanted, girl.

A town long known for its share of tales of hauntings and for old-time music, Radiance these days has more than it likes going on. Veins of coal mean someone is striking it rich, but landowners fear it’s not them. “The wrong decision will haunt you the rest of your life,” says local musician Leroy Loving. “Watch which dotted line you sign on, is my advice.”

My heart skipped a beat. I read the clipping again, then again as I settled on the name. Leroy Loving. My mouth went dry as I said it aloud. Loving. My own last name. I held the clipping underneath my flashlight, reading the words backwards and forwards. Maybe he was a cousin, or maybe it was a coincidence, that name. But Ruby had told me more than once how it was. We come from a long line of tale-tellers and fiddlers, she said, but had never told me more.

There was one more item in the stapled group, another news clipping. This one was a photograph with a note taped to it in the same delicate handwriting. Nary a ghost on this porch, Shaun. But there right ought to be. The photo was taken at night, and its black and white was grainy as smoke. A man was seated on the steps of a porch, a fiddle tucked beneath his chin and his bow raised. The caption: Kentucky Fiddler Makes the Music We Need. Beyond him were a group of people. Two women dancing, photographed mid-spin. Children and a ridge-backed dog. An old woman, a washboard strapped to her middle. And behind all of them, nearly hidden, a face that stopped my breath. My mother. Ruby Loving. How young she was, her face full of hope and something else I couldn’t name. Was it love? At the bottom edge of the clipping, one word. Radiance.

I stood so quick I was light-headed. The key-ring flashlight clattered near my feet, and its light went out as my head swam with names. Leroy Loving. Radiance. And my own mother, too. Was it this easy finding the father I’d never known? I studied the rest of the Radiance folder like it was the World Book encyclopedia. No further mention of Leroy or any other Loving. More ghosts in more towns than you could shake a stick at. Cards with handwriting on them—charms to cast out spirits. Homemade remedies for those who had lost loved ones and now suffered from broken hearts.

What I had seen this night was real ghosts, that much was true. In late-night movies, ghosts floated out the open windows of beat-up motels. They were the thing scientists wrote about in their notebooks. Ectoplasm. Lost souls. Ghosts in those movies were a gray something or other drifting across spaces like this basement and, somewhere you couldn’t see, chains rattled to see if you were listening. If ghosts were like in the movies, I could have thrown down my flashlight and run back up the stairs to Willy’s and been back at the Red Sari quick enough to hit the road before daylight. This was no movie, and these ghosts were as real as it got. I had just seen proof my mother had a past, and him too. My father, fiddling his tunes like they were a spell holding sway over her and over me, my whole life long. These were the ghosts that had always haunted me. Mother. Father. The past I didn’t know.

Ruby’s voice had fingers now. It touched my cheeks, traced along my eyebrows and held still. Everything you want is there if you know where to look.

I turned my little flashlight on again and held my hand in its beam until I saw the barest red shape of my own bones, an x-ray of the past. I seemed to remember myself, little and waking from some dream. Was it Ruby who bent above me, telling me to sleep, sleep now? She brushed strands from my eyes, then a bedroom door shut. How dark the room was. Times long gone were in my heart now, and I could hardly breathe for the sadness of it.

Cody stayed with me that night. I made us frozen dinners in the microwave while he walked around the room, studying the postcards of deserts and mountains and lightning and the photograph of my car that I’d taped to the closet door. Where’s this, he asked. I named the places I’d been for him like I never had before. Reno. Miami. Saudi Daisy, Tennessee. The names and names of times fell out of me, not like music exactly, but like—what did they call it?—a litany. I closed my eyes and listened to the hum of remembered bar light, the clink of coins in a jukebox, the clink of glasses making toasts to this time, that place, no place I’d ever been very long. And then I fell asleep, listening to the sound of Cody’s heart and his breathing. Did I imagine it, him saying that to me before we drifted off? You’re safe now, Miracelle.

In the night Ruby sang to me, that song from long ago, and as the words took shape, they made a song I knew. Love me in the morning, love me at night. Love me, honey, till long past daylight. The Ruby singing inside me was hoarse with cigarette smoke and whiskey. Her ghost-self cut decks of cards and told stories about lives not her own. Her feet danced inside my heart, slid sock-footed across one more barroom floor, across the floor of one more kitchen we never called our own. She stood by one more long-ago stove top, making the bittersweet of a love potion she never believed in. Love, girl, she’d said then. Why, you can’t trust that old thing.

Old men in their wool jackets of a summertime. Married women in their brush rollers, their worried faces. All of them come to us to settle up their accounts, the tangled-up places inside their hearts that her fingers knew how to unravel. Ruby held her card deck balanced on her palm, offered it up like it was something holy, and they’d shuffle the three times, cut the deck and lay out the three cards. Past. Present. Future. She summoned them all. Summoning or conjuring, I was never sure which. Calling forth was the truth of it, and what she called could have been wind outside, or a storm not seen in weeks, it had that much power. She’d tell about messages from kin long gone, about missing this, long-lost that, deeds and records, photographs and street addresses, phone numbers and even the names of almost forgotten songs. But mostly what my mother told was about hearts. Hearts torn open by time, hearts forgotten and lost in a gnarl of memory, hearts hurt or changed, stolen or damaged. Hearts almost beyond saving, she’d say.

Which was real and which was only memory? Me, sitting in the yard, the rust and creak of a metal chair as I rocked and listened and watched their shadows pass back and forth on the other side of a curtain in that trailer’s kitchen, then. The sound of boots out the back way and a motor revving, quick, and Ruby calling to me. Miracelle. Miracelle. My name from inside my mother’s mouth. Her in my arms and her blood on my shirt. A red shape on her chest like the wings of a bird, a shape that would never wash out. Ruby’s dying had a scent not hers, the scent of salt and blood, strange as snow in summer. Bits of torn paper surrounded her. Letters and halves of words. Rips and tears of paper from her notebook scattered beside her and edged with her blood. They never found the notebook when they searched the place later. Ever since, I’d been looking to fit the pieces together like they’d tell me my very own name.

When I was little, I’d search through drawers like I’d find my own self there. Drawers full of stockings and the silky feel of underwear. What did I think I’d really find? A photograph of some man, his face hidden by a hat’s brim. Some man I’d imagined again and again and again. A man with a father’s face I could never call my own. You can’t trust love, she said. Love was a worn-out toothbrush someone left behind. An empty bottle you’d pitch out a car window as you drove alongside a steep, steep bank. Love was a page from a book, ripped out and torn into a million pieces and thrown away. Love was a no-name father, a man I wanted to know and did not want and wanted more than anything. What did it mean that Cody Black told me I was safe now as he drifted off to sleep? What did it mean to be safe in this world or that world, none of them ever entirely my own?

Toward morning, I thought of the things from my past I knew for sure. Strings of love beads, red and orange and green, hippie beads on a string hung from a rearview mirror. Love songs on the radio. Help me, I think I’m falling, in love again. When I get that crazy feeling, I know I’m in trouble. How we’d driven along highways and back roads, Ruby Loving and me. She’d stop and buy me syrupy drinks with ice, ones so sweet and cold they froze inside my nose. Oh, you’re too young, she’d say. Too young to think about love. But I thought about it. Love was like fishnet stockings and skirts so short you had to pull them down again and again. Love was free. Love cost too much. Love was my mother, her face gone so sad, and I’d reach for her like I’d do this or this or this to make her better. Wait, she’d say. And I had. I’d waited forever and now here I was.

Here I was lying beside a boy so kind, a good, good man who saw right through me and might still like what he saw. Here I was, waking in one more motel room but readier than I’d been before to be still, hold on. Ready to give love a name and a face, ready to open my mouth and speak of love to Cody Black. Here I was half awake and half dreaming, remembering a love charm, one from all those years and years ago. On a night of the full moon, whisper your beloved’s name three times to the night wind. Ruby Loving had conjured those words again and again, dropped them into the potions she made, hoping against hope for love, casting her spell, and it had worked, settled, made me who I was.

I sat up, rubbing my eyes, shaking the night out of my eyes. The bed beside me was empty. “Cody?” I said.

He came from the bathroom, his T-shirt and face damp from the shower, sat on the edge of the bed near me. “You slept some.” He’d made us coffee in the pot beside the bathroom sink, and he settled beside me on the bed with the cups.

“Dreamed more than slept.” The tip of my tongue burned from hot coffee. “I need to show you something, Cody,” I said at last.

I went to the dresser drawer, the bottom one where I kept a few things I seldom looked at. I hardly noticed the reflection of my own naked self in the dresser mirror, though that was something I was shy about.

“There,” I said as I took out a box, a small round metal one decorated with winter things. Fat little Santas, their noses red from the cold. A reindeer starting up from a snowbank, flying across the dark sky as I came back to the bed.

“Christmas in summer?” He leaned against the headboard of the bed and sipped his coffee.

As I pried the lid off the box, I felt the way my face was, the set of my mouth, the way my dreams had settled inside me. I scattered the torn pieces as if they were confetti, a celebration, but there was none.

He held a torn square up to his eyes. “What’s this?”

The pieces were jagged puzzle pieces that had never fit, one against the other. Pieces of a map I had long not known how to read. Paper shreds with spatters of blood gone brown with time, gathered that night she was shot. I stirred the pieces on the bed beside him. Halves of sentences. Halves of words and letters. A. By. If you only would.

“What is all this?” he said again.

“I guess it’s my mother, or what I have left of her.”

“Your mother?” He set his cup on the nightstand, picked up more of the scraps, held them up to the light. “Sometimes it’s hard to think you ever had a mother, Miracelle.”

“Her name was Ruby.”

“She would have a name the color of a heart.”

I tucked my legs under the covers and we sat like that, the heap of paper tears between us. “She died when I was just fifteen,” I said. “And she had hands that could tell a fine fortune.”

He took hold of my own hand. “Hands like yours?”

“Let’s just say they were fortune-teller hands more complicated than mine.”

“How did she die?”

“I guess that depends,” I said.

“Don’t be so cryptic, Miracelle. Tell me.”

“She died under mysterious circumstances.”

Nobody said anything for a spell.

“All right,” he said. “And what did you do after she died? You were a kid.”

“You do what you have to, Cody.”

“You do, at that. Who was this mother?”

“She taught me to read cards,” I began.

“Cards are one thing, but who was she?”

The black hair. The long, fine fingers holding a glass of cheap red wine. “You know about as much as me.” My voice felt small. “You want to know? She was shot.”

His voice gentled. “Shot?”

“Killed and I held her while she died. I never knew who did it—all I saw were shadows and a pair of boots that might have been my father’s.”

He scooted next to me. “All these bits of writing.” He sifted through the tears of paper. Mountains. Eyes the color of sand. After he left. “What are they?”

“My mother kept a notebook. And these pieces of paper are all that was left of it on the night she died.”

“You were just fifteen. What did you do? Where did you go?”

“I did what you see me doing, Cody. What I’ve done ever since.”

“And your father? Who was he in all this?”

“That I never knew.” I went back to the drawer and reached in where I’d hidden it from myself at the bottom of the box. The clipping. I took it out and smoothed it against the blanket. “Until this. I found this in some research files in the basement at Willy’s.”

He took it from me and read it, let it lie on his lap, read it again. “Leroy Loving. You think it’s him?”

I took the clipping up again, held it against my chest. I could almost feel it, the music on that porch, the way a fiddle’s strings must have quivered beneath his fingers. But I shook my head, a silent yes, not sure I could say the words. My father. Maria Murdy had said as much that day on the phone. A town like light.

And then there’s the bigger question, Miracelle.”

“And what would that be?”

“Who are you?”

“I would have thought you’d know that by now.”

He sorted through the torn paper like he was looking for what to say next. He held up a square to the lamplight. “You’re like this,” he said.

The bit of paper had one word on it, a word ghostly with years-old ink. Radiance. He laid it in my palm.

“All that light underneath your skin. Like you’re full up to here, in love with someone or something you’ve never even met.”

“I don’t have the least notion what you mean, Cody Black,” I said.

The paper word in my hand felt hot. Alive. Radiance. The word fit against the clipping from Willy’s basement and I could nearly hear the sound of pieces falling where they ought to be. Leroy Loving. I studied the fiddle player’s face in the clipping like I had known it all my life. Was it that easy, finding my father? My father, like a song from the past I couldn’t quite recall.

“Don’t love me, Cody Black,” I said before I intended to say anything at all.

His eyes were startled, like I’d caught him being hurt before he forgot that I was looking. The soft down of his hair growing out. A tiny scar underneath his chin. How beautiful he was. A beautiful man who meant the best. And me? A woman without a clue about anything at all.

“I can’t account for what I feel, Miracelle,” he said. “I can’t say why I feel what I do for you, and I don’t even have a name for it yet.” He sat raking through the paper scraps like they were something alive. “But I do know this. You aren’t going to love another living soul until you find out who you are.”

A car revved in the parking lot of the Red Sari, and I stood by the window watching the trail of smoke from its tailpipe. How easy it was to come to know things, to count on them. The bitter taste of motel coffee. The way a hand felt, held in my own.

“Don’t love me, Cody Black,” I said again.

It hurt to breathe as I said this, and I wondered what I meant. Don’t love me now? Don’t love me yet? I had no idea what he heard, or how, but somewhere day was starting up. In my hand, the one torn-away word. Radiance.