The Persistence of Ghosts

by Lee Price

Our mother waited until her twenty-ninth birthday to tell us she was pregnant. 

“Are you girls excited to have a brother?” she asked from the front seat, while my little sister and I unwrapped our after-dinner candy in the back. In the parking lot of the Carolina Fish Fry, my belly swam with an ache of popcorn shrimp. “You better eat those other baby shrimps, or they’ll miss their family,” my mother had urged at dinner. She always upset me into finishing my seafood platter this way.

My sister was four, I was six, and we fought most of the way home over who would get to change the new baby’s diaper first. Our father pulled our station wagon into the driveway while we unclipped ourselves from our booster seats and tumbled out into the mild cool of North Carolina in winter. 

My dream came either that night or the next. Heat on my face and hallways of smoke. The impossible weight of eyelids that felt swollen shut, but still let me see. Purple spikes of fire punched through windows in a room I didn’t recognize. 

I woke from it in whimpers, tearing out of bed and into the living room, screaming that it was all burned, my eyes searching the mute dark on the other side of our unshattered windows. My father led me back to bed, with assurances that nothing was aflame. That we were all quite safe. 

The following week, our mother pulled me from sleep and out of the top bunk, my sister from the bottom, led us in our jammies and slitty eyes out to the front yard. 

“The barn caught fire,” she said, face aglow in light, pointing.

 A farm’s menagerie of goats, sheep, a few cows, and stagnant pigs were housed after dark in a barn across our street. That night, we watched the flames rise higher than any roof while bits of ash floated through the air, landing in my sister’s wide-open mouth. The clouds lit up while two creepy silos stretched into the sky. Some of the animals survived, but after the fire they cried at night.

“I get those dreams too,” my mother said, days after the fire, her face pressed into my hair. “But your Daddy doesn’t believe in all that.” 

My father was the sort of man who heeded scripture. 

The Bible speaks of twenty-one dreams, all of them warnings. Except one. In a dream, the Lord appears to King Solomon, saying “Ask for what you want.” Solomon answers, “Give me understanding, to know good from evil.” The Lord is pleased with this request and gives Solomon a wise and discerning heart. 

The Bible says that when Solomon woke, he ran to Jerusalem, stood before the ark of the Lord’s covenant and burnt offerings to his generous god. 

I imagined this scene as my sister and I listened to the goats bleating in the nights after the fire that claimed their family, their shelter. Solomon waking with the dream coating his thoughts, tearing through darkness toward the holy city. The glug of blood from the lamb’s slaughter wound, how it must have started to clot by the time the flames wrapped his woolly form. 

Our mother slipped back inside, to keep the speck of our brother from the smoke, while my sister and I stayed with our father on the porch. We watched firefighters carry the animals that could be held away from the flames and I kept brooding on Solomon, his dream, the ark. Our little family, on the verge of being made whole. 

Being six years old, I conflated my Bible stories. When I pictured Solomon, bowed before the ark of the covenant, I mistakenly imagined the hulking wooden hull of a boat. Wondered about the animals I thought Noah had once siloed inside, and if the wise King thought of them, too, as he prayed. If he considered those creatures that had folded against each other, outlasting the storm? Imagined their feeble legs stretching as they stepped from the vessel, back onto the earth, spongy after so many months underwater? Or was he too flushed with awe, marveling only at the clout of divine promises made to precious men? 

With his newly wise and discerning heart, I wondered if he forgot to consider the worst. The disgust of a god repulsed by her creations, drowning the whole-of-the-world with her rage. 

My mother spoke to me in whispers about premonitions, dreams. The presence that dwelt at the corner of my eye and back of my neck. The way an emotion could hit me suddenly, root, and bloom in my body with a quickness, then fall away to nothing. Like it belonged to someone else, like I was being shown something. 

“That’s from my side.” She lived to conjure herself this way, as descended from the kind of wizened women who built sunlit, gleaming lives while culling power in the unseen. The kind of women who said the prayers, bore the children, tilled the soil, and tended the gardens, but did so beckoned by the hazier forces of the world. Women who relished their proximity to shadow, knew the allure of their darkness. Look at what we see, sense, dream. Watch us hold steady while the lot of you tremor at what lurks. 

There were tales about sightings, of dead family members appearing again, suddenly, peeking around their old haunts at darker hours. Of my mother waking to the instant and utter knowledge that her grandmother, dead after a rough hundred years of life, was at the end of the bed, perched atop the quilt and staring while my mother straddled the portal between sleep and waking. Of her vanishing just as my mother snapped on a light. 

“But it’s the bad dreams you gotta watch,” my mother warned. And she made a rule. 

“They’re less liable to come true if you tell them,” she said. “But you have to say it fast.” When my dreams slipped off my mind like a skin, a whole new dread rushed forth. The stakes were high. What was evading me—offal or prophecy? I would shut my eyes and reel back, dipping down again to scrape up some darkness left in sleep. To summon it back. So I could tell, and stop the coming true. Early on, I was eager to claim that power, to sidle up bravely to the shadows.

Such a futile scene—my mother and I, repeating our little nightmares back and forth, with messy hair and sleep-crusted eyes. Thinking ourselves enough to sway what might be fated. With an assurance I cannot now fathom. Us breathless from a bad night’s sleep, hearts still flapping. Convincing ourselves we mattered. Diving the dark lakes of our minds, sludging up our nighttime scaries and making offerings of our dread. The staggering gall of us and our dreams. 

Still, we held this power to be true, and ours. But it was to be borne carefully, silenced if it made anyone stiffen with discomfort. Unless administering discomfort was your whole aim, which, I came to learn, was a powerful spell itself.

As a family, it seemed we were forever making our home atop the dead and amongst their ghosts. A couple of years after the fire, once my brother was born and old enough to toddle, we moved into a haunted house. And then we moved into another. 

The first, we built from the ground up. On land backing up to the tiny gravesite where the bodies of our small hamlet’s founding family, the McKays, were buried. Tucked into the bend of the golf course’s ninth hole. Dogwoods and a hollow oak shaded the mossy ground where crumbles of rock stumped up from the soil, the letters and numbers worn down to smooth. The earliest date we could make out was 1818. We played there often, searching between the rocks stacked into leaning walls around the oldest of the graves. We did as we liked—removed stones we wanted, took them home, made them ours. Tread roughly all over burial sites with our small feet, reckless in a way we would have not dared at any of the other cemeteries. We knew better than to traipse over a grave, disrespecting the dead. But these bodies were so long departed, so ground down to grit, and their gravesite so nearly in our yard, that we felt loose enough to tramp the ground, steal their rocks. 

We didn’t count on the persistence of ghosts. 

A lady from church realized, then told us: the floorplan of our house, selected by my mother, was identical to the ancestral home of the family buried out back. Down the road, across the big new highway that bisected our town, the McKay House still stood. Used by the local Bible college who owned it (and the cemetery, the golf course, the barn that burned; they owned it all) to house missionaries resting between crusades. But no one had lived there in decades. 

Back in my own, living family’s modern rendition of this home, the dead family pushed against the gauzy cloak splitting our life from their sweet hereafter. Doorknobs rattled. Shadows passed the threshold of rooms at the edge of my eye. Footsteps fell in the attic, and a heaviness settled over my body whenever I stood still in the front hallway. Climbing the stairs always felt like being chased. Like my arms were caught in the weak grip of hands, the faintest clench. My mother, and sometimes my sister, felt it too.

When I was ten years old: dance recital night. Me: looking ridiculous, spandexed in sequins and fringe, trotting down those front stairs in clogging shoes hooved with metal taps. I slipped on the glossy wood and my body pitched in the air. My legs, oranged in the thick of dance tights, kicking out as my head sailed back. 

I’m going to crack my skull, I thought, struck by how slow the world had become. That’s when I felt hands, sliding under my back, beneath my shoulders, pushing me in the other direction. I landed on my seat instead of my head, my ankle in a twist beneath me. 

But more vivid than hands, I felt a settling of so many bad feelings, fading to a complete knowing that I had been spared of something worse barreling my way. I hoped this would be the end of feeling chased up the stairs, pounced on in the foyer. But it was the same after my fall—the bad sensation cloyed. Even when I stood at the bottom of the stairs, trying to summon that lull of having been carried. You are safe, I thought, willing myself to walk slower than felt right. You will not be harmed, I recited, climbing the steps. 

Our father claimed to not see or sense the ghosts, did not like to hear us get carried away about it. Our mother stoked the story of our haunting, thrilled at the run of bumps sprouting on anyone’s forearms when she lowered her tone and went in on the details. Which she did with a growing brazenness, a slow veer toward the dark. She started taking me on drives through the country at night, to play songs and talk and cry about my father and all the ways he failed her. Like our ghosts, these failures were not the type you could see. Scripture says a man will hold fast to his wife. But I sensed her loneliness, the decay of love that hung on them each. We stopped sometimes, on these nights, at roadside cemeteries. Left our car to stroll the graves, closing our eyes and seeing whom or what we could let in. 

My parents built that haunted house for us to live in forever. I was a teenager when it was sold in their divorce. By that time we all felt quite haunted, but the ghosts were quaint ordeals in the wake of our family’s rupture.

The next house was deeper in the country. Pushed down a path, beyond a covered bridge: an arts-and-crafts bungalow, waiting where the dark forest met the stretching fields. An assault of green and light. 

“A meadow,” my mother’s most trusted psychic, a woman in New Orleans, told her earlier that year. “Where you’re going next has a meadow.” On that same trip, another, lesser psychic pronounced that she had spent a past life as a nun. My mother laughed and deemed that one a faker, but years later, a woman in SoHo I hired to heal my aura said my mother onced ruled a convent. “In a past life, of course. She was your sister, in that one. It was really bad for you.”

My siblings and I found the graves a few weeks after we moved in and started clomping the woods. Tucked into the trees, well before the abandoned moonshine still, was a cluster of slabs baring no letters. The headstones were set such a short distance apart, we could only figure: children? We didn’t tread on these but walked past and never lingered. Further back: the Black River which ran more like a stream, this sad little tributary of the rushing Cape Fear. A dribble of dark water, snaking between the pines. 

The barn at that house burned too, but by that time, my mother and I were both too soaked in sleeping potions to notice our dreams. For me: a deluge of over-the-counter syrups, geltabs that bludgeoned me into a swamp of sleep. For her: prescribed pills that made her mind go purple, sent her careening through a vast desert bathed in night. She did all sorts of things on those pills. She turned music up and watched herself dance in the mirror. She lay on her back on the kitchen floor and spun in circles until she fell asleep, twitching. She called people she knew (strangers to me) from earlier decades of her life and talked on the phone for hours. Then she took to running through the woods, past the graves, the still, and all the way to the river. The dead were in there, she said, and she belonged with them. 

“You know how bad I am,” she screamed, clawing at me, her runty seventeen-year-old, holding her back as she strained to run. My fear was of flesh, bone, a knot of blonde and the scrape of red nails against my forearms locked around her waist. The terror of my mother was so acute, I could not see any ghosts, could feel nothing but the thrum of my heart, the fist of my guts. But my mother insisted dead people were there, waiting, and then not waiting. Encroaching, rising up from the water and coming through the trees to rap on our windows, drag her back into the woods. 

“Did you see someone out there?” Her nails sank into my arm while the sun was bright in the sky. When the ghosts started appearing to her in the daylit hours I felt the break of relief. Like we had landed on more solid ground, scorched and hostile as it may have been. Surely this was illness: delusion. A haunting of another sort. Something I could dig my hands into, thrust at my father, my uncles, and say: This is happening. To her, to me. To all of us. 

I never saw the people in the river or in the woods. Eventually my father came over and took our mother away to the state psychiatric hospital. She got off those sleeping pills and when she came back, he came with her. There was no more talk of the ghosts, people at the treeline, people in the river, or psychics who foretold this black-and-green place. The house never felt right, although what would I have known of a home without haunting? 

Decades later, scrolling my phone, I read that the world’s oldest tree had been discovered in North Carolina. A bald cypress that predated salvation, sprouted before Mary wandered the streets of Bethlehem, searching for a spot to render a savior unto the world. A behemoth from when God was just a Father, haunting all his children with the Holy Ghost. I tapped the map and blinked at the familiar topography that zipped to my screen. I zoomed in until the name of the snaking thread appeared. The Black River. Running fifty miles, it nursed this primordial tower of bark, sap, and root looming not far from our dark homestead. Consider the power of a thing both living and ancient, scrimming behind our little human tragedy. We could have confessed each bad dream, every morning, and still. The branch of our life would have grown unchanged. 

I have never seen a ghost, but I have felt their hands. Their urgency. Their wisdom, dedication. The deal I have made is that I refuse to see. My eyes are my boundary. Let the rest of my body be a portal to the next. I cannot keep them from my heart, throat, belly, guts. And so I bear witness in other ways, but I will not open my eyes. 

I was thirty-three, living in New York City. My husband was downstairs at the bar again, while I lay upstairs in our apartment trembling beneath the bright patches of the quilt my great-grandmother pecked together with needle and thread. We had been married a year, me and this man who met life with a roaring intensity that kept me scared, riding the swoop in my belly whenever he took to reigning his kind of fire. It was hard to be loved by him and harder still, I knew, to be him. His mind an always-scream of numbers, time, reptitions. The world slower and more unyielding than he was built to bear. His thoughts eased only when he made them go viscous with liquid spirits. My kinetic, drunken husband, waging his forever-wars against the world. 

I kept throwing up. I had not been able to stop for two weeks and had lost fifteen pounds, wearied down to my knobs. It was not my first spell of sickness during this year of matrimony. Now I lay on the couch, under my dead Mawmaw Juanita’s quilt, finally slain. Each breath stabbed, a gurgling burn from belly to throat. The sun spiked hard onto the quilt's bright patches as my Mawmaw Juanita’s voice broke in with a gentle urge to, “Sit up now, baby.” The impossibility of moving rolled away like a boulder, and I hoisted upright. The quilt still draped over my head (covering me like the sheet in a bad costume, a Halloween ghost), blocking my sight. 

Her hands were on me, unmistakable taps on my back, tilting me forward. At the back of my neck, coaxing the clench of my throat open. The sun brightened into a yellow explosion of heat on my spine. Bright spikes of white pain surged in my gut and I heard her voice again, coaxing me through. 

“Breathe baby, you gonna be all right.” 

Her hands eased me, made inching adjustments, folded me into postures that brought relief. Dulled the sabre of hurt, and when it could not be dulled and my stomach was lanced again, I felt her petting hands at my back, her heart willing this sickness to be done. At the peak of the torment, purple bursts behind my eyelids, her hands were quick and sure on my shoulders, and I let the image come. Of me, pretzling myself beneath this blanket, moaning. Her looking as she had in life. Crouched to her knees, big hind end resting on the coffee table. Her soft hands in circles on my back, light and loving as the press of a cat at my side. 

When my gallbladder came out I got better, gained back some weight. Resumed the onslaught of living with my husband. Wondered at the wreckage of my life and how it would end. Stared at the front ends of trains pulling into stations, the windshields of passing buses, and wondered: Would I be one of the livelier sorts of ghosts? 

My father predicted my marriage would end in one of two ways: happily-ever-after or double-murder. In the year after my wedding I took to calling him early in the morning after hard nights with my husband. We talked about the things he had always silenced. The nightmares that crept into my waking life, the little synchronicities I loaded up with meaning. The spirits, how I sensed their feelings lapping at me still. The tarot card that jumped from the deck of each kind woman I paid to read—always the Devil in those days. 

My father and mother had been remarried to one another for thirteen years. I told him about the quilt and the hands, expecting scripture. 

“How incredible,” he breathed into the phone, and I felt the rush of the Cape Fear River, moving darkly in the distance.

Months later, I found myself in a finished basement in New Jersey, convinced by a friend to go with her to see a medium. 

This friend was from the sort of rigid New England stock that was raised to believe in the dignity of atheism. Nothing beyond. Then her mother developed Parkinson’s disease and died. After the funeral, as I was thumbing at my new tarot deck, the first I’d owned, she felt softened enough by wine and grief to ask. How had her mother felt, in those months before death? When the trap of her body had withered from muscle and flex to wilt and slack? Could I tell her, would the cards know?

The cards always know. Hanged man. Nine of swords. The Tower. Death. Because I plucked them without yet knowing the meanings, I had to read from the guidebook. My stupid voice a parade of hard words: surrender, despair, disruption, change. My friend dropped her head and wept while I felt a dull thump at my body’s center and a tremor in my throat—a pleading force to shut the portal, end this rush. She began searching online for mediums the next morning. Of course I agreed to go. 

But when my Mawmaw Juanita came to the medium in the finished basement in New Jersey, I had not been seeking her. My thoughts were splashing around pleasurably in the night before. Finally, I had let the bartender from the place downstairs, where my husband spent hundreds of dollars each week, come up to my apartment to kiss me. He had wanted to for a long time. My husband was out of the city that weekend, and I was weightless with the mercy of his absence, thrilled he was spending all of our money on alcohol somewhere else. It was the best I’d felt in a while, and I did not care to be disrupted by ghosts. 

“Oh wow, this is something big.” The dark-haired medium with spangly black bracelets looked serious, cocked her ear up while she spoke. “She’s been coming in dreams but you’re not getting it. So she’s here to insist. She needs help with her husband.” I ran my fingers over the frizz of the beige carpet and ignored the twitch of my friend’s face. 

My great-grandfather, Pawpaw Earl, was hung between his death in this life and whatever came next. When a spirit is particularly disturbed, the medium explained, they can’t make the transition. Cannot cease the thrash of their essence and sweep out into the final ocean. Mawmaw Juanita had made the swim easily, arriving in the afterlife to see her rageful husband, dead twenty years already, locked in some hateful chamber of his own wrath. Her vicious man beating back the tide. 

What I remember of my great-granddaddy, Pawpaw Earl: a small body and shining white scalp. A vague story as to how the bullet that protruded from his forehead came to have barreled through his skull. He was always roaring, a little tyrant—at the television, into the phone, at my mother and grandmother and Mawmaw Juanita. His devoted women, steadfast in their forgiveness. 

“He reminds me of Pawpaw,” my mother said after she met my husband, taking in his small frame, his intensity. I took it as a sign of propriety, further proof that I had found a man to whom I should belong. 

“There’s more,” the medium said. “She says this part is important. She says that if you help her with her husband, she’s going to help you with yours.” 

My friend’s face spasmed as I held my chin steady. 

“But you’ve got to pray, pray, pray. Thirty prayers to Mary, daily,” the dark-haired woman said, explaining that she was a Catholic, despite the living she made by conjuring ghosts. 

After we left, I did not invoke Mary and I did not say thirty prayers. What I did, the next weekend, instead: waited for my husband to finish his beer and leave for the bar. Ran a bath, turned music up loud. Gathered my sacred objects: the jewel box Mawmaw Juanita gave me, a locket of hers shaped like a heart, the white leather mini-Bible I had been given to carry as I walked down the aisle. Lined them all up in a row. Spread the quilt beside them on the floor. It had been a wedding gift, given decades in advance. 

“Reckon I’ll be gone-on-to-glory by the time y’all girls get married,” Mawmaw Juanita said to each of her granddaughters as she surrendered the quilts. “But these will sit right nice on your beds until then.” 

I walked into my bathroom and lit fire to a swamp’s harvest of dried cypress, hauled back from my last trip south. Set it on a platter and watched the flames die to lines of orange and smolder blue. Tossed salt in the bathwater and eased myself in. The tears came fast; I let snot run out of my nose and across my lips, dribble off my chin while my slumped body shook. 

I had spent too much of my life naked and tremoring in this basin. 

Months before, at the depth of my sickness, I stripped and lay in a curl against the sloping back of the tub. All my body’s fluids were being wrung from my stomach, guts, the inflamed tunnel of my esophagus. I had been heaving for hours and grown too weak to hover my head above the toilet. So I lay in the tub to drain—a bright stream of bile down my neck, chest, seeping beneath my flanks. Tinged red. Hot as the tears that burned down my face. Hot as my shame when my husband stood over the mess of me, swaying over his volcanic wife. The both of us erupting. He used these words: disgusting, repulsed.

“You are so weak,” he said, swigging a bottle and walking away. 

In the tub again, I felt that memory rip through, pushed my face into my hands and rocked. The cast-iron basin was old, and deep, and waves of salt water curved from one end of the tub to the other. Around my head and crashing over my toes, I worked up my momentum and let them toss me around. A violent drag out to sea. I put my head under the water and screamed. 

I rose from the bath, dripping, and walked right out to the quilt. The cypress bunch furled off trains of black smoke that filled the apartment, crawled into each bright fiber of the quilt, rolled over every flat surface. Burned what could be cleansed away. 

The lamb on King Solomon’s altar trotted into my mind again, then the animals of Noah’s ark. How they must have lain crusted in their own shit and milk—forsaken, weak—while rocked by swells of holy rage. The frail betrayal of all their creature bodies run down to scrawn and gristle. How their legs would have thickened in time, after the storm. Blood like a miracle bursting from their shouting hearts, as they slammed hooves on ground that, finally, had dried out and hardened. 

My husband left our apartment three weeks later. A few days passed, then my mother called with a report. The bingo card we kept after Mawmaw Juanita’s funeral, the one she memorized and played every day in the nursing home, had fallen off its shelf. In the house where my mother and my father now live, which has never felt haunted. 

Published October 25th, 2020