Driving With Dead People Read online

  My mother was right; I shouldn’t have seen this. And now I couldn’t even tell her I had. I stared at Sarah’s coffin, and I knew I could not choose death, because nothing, not even Dad, could be more frightening than ending up in a coffin with your lips sewn shut.

  Even with Dad the way he was, always hitting and humiliating us, and even if Mom never noticed, I didn’t want to die—not really. And besides, there was always Granda. Granda still took the best care of me and loved me more than anyone. She walked up beside me, and I grabbed her hand for reassurance.

  On the way to the car we stopped to chat with Etta Mae Shaw. I waited, looking at my feet. It wasn’t until then that I realized that somewhere between the coffin and Mrs. Shaw, I’d peed in my shoes. My socks were yellow and wet on the inside of my ankles, and the familiar stickiness of my soaked panties confirmed it. Granda kept an old brown furniture blanket in her trunk for just such occasions. I sat on it all the way home.

  The next morning I woke up around five a.m.

  I got up and peeled off my wet pajama bottoms. Don’t throw those wet pants on my hardwood floors, Mom harped in my brain. I tossed them on the wet sheets and rolled the whole thing up into a ball. The house was silent. I tiptoed to the bathroom and threw the whole mess into the bathtub. On the way back to bed I peeked in Jamie’s room.

  With his hands resting on top of his blue-and-red-striped sheets, eyes shut, and breath barely noticeable, Jamie looked dead. I panicked. “Jamie!” I screamed. “Jamie!” He jumped out of bed, grabbed my arms, and jerked me into the dining room in one move.

  “What? What is it? What’s going on?”

  “I thought you were dead,” I mustered.

  “I almost died when you screamed,” he shushed me. I was shaking like crazy as we listened to hear if the fuss had woken up Mom or Dad. No one. “Shit, Monica, you freaked me out. I think that dead girl tweaked your brain. Come on.”

  Jamie tiptoed me back to my room, where JoAnn and Becky were peacefully sleeping. I pulled on another pair of pajama bottoms and he helped me with my early morning ritual, putting a beach towel over the pee spot and a dry sheet on top of that. With luck, it wouldn’t soak through.

  I climbed into bed in my mismatched pajamas: pink hearts on top, blue rocket hand-me-downs on bottom. I longed for a time when I would eat breakfast in matching top and bottom pajamas. No one else seemed to notice. My clean pajamas and sheets just regularly showed up, no comment. I managed in silence along with everyone else. That morning I wanted order in my world. More than anything else, I wanted my pajamas to match.

  Jamie started out the bedroom door. “That girl gets buried today; they’ll be digging the hole this morning,” I said. He turned and looked at me. “Yep, today’s hole day,” he said. I shot him my Please don’t leave me look. He came over and sat down on the floor beside my bed, leaning his head against the wooden side railing. The top of his hair was bristly from the buzz cut Dad had given him earlier that week. I patted it in thanks. “Go to sleep, Monica.” I curled up in a ball.

  Odds were, with Jamie there, I could sleep. If the planets aligned, I also might stay dry until I woke up. Just as I was settling in, my stomach tightened. Out my window the sun was coming up, but not for everyone. Some of us were dead.

  Chapter Two

  The morning of Sarah Keeler’s burial, I sat in the Galesburg Methodist Church between JoAnn and my father, whose heavy arm rested on the back of the pew right above my head. My legs were too short to touch the floor, but if I pressed my toes down, I could almost reach it. I was growing.

  The church sat kitty-corner across the street from our house, but we were late every Sunday. The service started at nine a.m., and at nine ten my family would be running across the street in uncomfortable dress shoes, Dad calling us “idiots” as the opening hymn, “Love Lifted Me,” wafted out the church windows.

  The service that morning, led by the small and dreary Reverend Morse, was a dull drone, and I found myself staring at the large stained glass window on the left side of the church. I loved how the sun moved across that window every Sunday and how by the end of the service it was centered right in the middle of Jesus’s face. This depended on where you were sitting, but we always sat in the exact same pew, so as long as it wasn’t cloudy, the sun ended on Jesus.

  I wasn’t attached to Jesus, exactly, but I had heard about him since birth and held a kind of respect for all he’d been through. The hymn “Low in the Grave He Lay” pretty much told it all: He’d had a difficult life and a pretty rotten death. So I gave him the inner thumbs-up as I watched the sun and prayed for it to cross his left cheek, which would mean I was almost out of there.

  Church was the only place where I sat close to my father. He felt less prickly there, and as much as I hated him, I wanted him to love me. In the silence of church I tried to steal closeness.

  He seemed almost friendly in church because of his expression while singing hymns he knew by heart. His head would tilt to the right, eyes closed, forehead lifted. He looked so relaxed. When he took a breath, his head would dip with each inhale. His voice was beautiful. How could he sing so well and be so mean? The voice didn’t fit the man, but it gave me hope.

  The ending prayer finally came and I wiggled off the pew. Free—sort of. We still had to go to Sunday lunch at my grandparents’ house.

  After walking home and changing out of our church clothes, my family piled into our white station wagon and drove three blocks to Mammaw and Papaw’s house. We could never just walk down there because there were too many hot covered dishes that had to be hauled along. I spent many Sundays sitting in the backseat holding a kitchen towel around warm baked beans with bacon sizzling on top, or a rectangular metal pan filled with cream cheese and lemon Jell-O mix meant to pass as a cheesecake.

  Sundays with the Petersons, my dad’s side of the family, were a recurring nightmare. Every weekend Mammaw and Papaw’s six sons (my dad being the oldest) came with their large families in tow. My uncle Carl rarely came, but his family, Aunt Evelyn and the three boys, did.

  Carl drove a Greyhound bus, so we hardly ever saw him. When we did, his eyelids were sleepy and droopy from driving strangers all over the country. Uncle Carl was the only one of us who traveled, and his sons, Ben, Tim, and Paul (who also had droopy eyelids), were the only cousins we liked.

  The other cousins, whom I knew only because we shared the same pathetic gene pool, poured out of station wagons with scowls on their faces. Uncle Bill’s son Troy talked like he had a sock stuck in the back of his throat, and my cousin Karen looked sad, even when she was laughing. All of my cousins were scared of my dad.

  Dad took special pleasure in humiliating children; all of us had been the butt of it at one family event or another. Today it would be my turn again.

  Uncle Ernie got out of his truck. The night before he’d been drunk again and someone had tossed him through the front window of the Galesburg Tavern. He was covered in cuts and bruises. I watched everyone talk to him as if his nose were still firmly attached.

  Mammaw, oblivious to Ernie’s injuries and our sour faces, loved a crowd and was always glad to see us. If we came right after church, she still had her teeth in, but if it was later in the day, she was all gums, and her shoes were long forgotten.

  Mammaw rarely bathed, which bothered my overly bathed mother, but if you spent the night there, you didn’t have to bathe either. And forget having to brush your teeth.

  Mammaw embarrassed me with her red SOS-pad hair and her yellowed toenails. I was ashamed to feel that way because she loved all of us—fiercely. Mammaw never forgot a birthday even though there were more than thirty of us grandkids.

  I felt sorry for Mammaw. I suspected she’d seen her share of tragedies. One Saturday afternoon we were standing on her back porch when the front tire of my gold bike exploded from the heat of the sun. It made a loud boom and Mammaw thought someone had fired a shotgun. She dropped to the kitchen linoleum and lay down flat, her thick arms protecting h
er head. The speed at which she hit the floor told me she’d been shot at before. It didn’t surprise me.

  Dad told us that when he was little, Papaw would drink whiskey and then sit down at the dinner table and say, “I can’t stare at you bunch of lazy asses anymore. I’m gonna blow my goddamn head off.” He’d scoot his chair back, grab his shotgun, and head out to the barn. Mammaw and the six boys would sit silently at the table waiting for the gun to go off. It never did.

  Today for the Sunday get-together, I saw Papaw setting up card tables in the garage and on the lawn. Extra chairs were borrowed from the Galesburg Volunteer Fire Department across the alley. There was always a table heaped with food and a big orange plastic container with a white screw-on lid filled to the brim with iced tea laced with plenty of liquid saccharine.

  Mammaw and Papaw lived in town now, but they used to manage a farm out on the county line. My dad grew up on that farm, killing chickens right before he cooked them, and butchering hogs in the barnyard. They’d been desperately poor, but Mammaw and Papaw, uneducated and fertile, kept having sons one right after the other. Those boys slaved away on that farm under the eye of my ferocious papaw. He was thin as a rail and bent over by the time I knew him, but I saw pictures and heard stories of what a big man he used to be and how he used to beat his kids, and Mammaw, too.

  At these family get-togethers I usually stayed outside the house to avoid my father. I also considered my personal safety at risk whenever Mammaw cooked.

  Her kitchen was an exotic and dangerous place, the main culprit being a pressure cooker that sputtered and splashed on the stove. If I had to be in the kitchen while she was cooking, I was always ready to duck if that thing exploded. It actually happened once, and my uncle Bill was scalded all the way down the left side of his body. No one but me seemed to be worried about a second occurrence.

  Mammaw was a creative cook, concocting meals of squirrel, brains (any animal), pig’s ears (which were actually the pig’s scrotum), and greens pulled right out of her yard. She pickled anything standing still and jellied anything on a vine. Her egg noodles were thick, creamy, and delicious. I enjoyed them as best I could, considering I didn’t know what was in them.

  She stored all kinds of vegetables and relishes she’d canned herself in a dirt root cellar that Papaw built for her below the kitchen. The only way into the root cellar was a wooden door stuck right in the floor of the pantry. Sitting at Mammaw’s kitchen table, I’d sometimes hear a jar explode down there. After the CRACK-and-SPLAT sound, Mammaw would look toward the pantry and say, “Fermented,” and continue chopping carrots. When she finally pulled open the door in the floor, the stench would be unbearable. I assumed “fermented” meant “explodes and stinks like hell.”

  But this Sunday, as Sarah Keeler was being lowered into the ground, I walked into Mammaw’s backyard. I was trying to figure out the best place to disappear to, when I saw my dad staring out the window at me. I felt that familiar jerk in my stomach. He was mad at me for something, and I had no idea what it was. I turned and walked in the other direction, feeling his eyes on me the whole way.

  The world wasn’t safe today. The truth was, this world was never safe.

  I walked around the back of the garage where Dash, Mammaw’s dalmatian, sat chained to his house. Dash had one blue eye and one brown eye and wasn’t overly friendly—due to the chain. He sat there staring at me with those crazy eyes. Feeling crazy myself, I decided to take a load off.

  I pretended to pet Dash, who never wanted to be petted, in case someone saw me sitting out there alone, though no one would. He smelled like shit. The nub of his tail was dabbed purple with some kind of cure-all that Mammaw had used on the farm to castrate pigs.

  Mammaw invented her own medicines. She created a salve for drawing out splinters that was made up of three different poisons. It would have killed you if you ate it, but slap a dab on a splinter, and your worries were over. JoAnn joked that if you used too much, it might actually pull up an organ.

  I sat down next to Dash and looked up at the sun. Sarah was probably under dirt by now. I thought of her eyes, nose, and hands in the airless pitch-black grave. I looked at Dash and the mudsplattered doghouse and wasn’t sure which was worse—a shitty life or a shitty death.

  Plucking up blades of grass, I wondered if I’d be able to see Sarah’s grave when my school bus rolled by the cemetery tomorrow. Maybe…unless she was buried in the back somewhere. I started to feel better, thinking I might be able to sneak a moment with Sarah on school days. Maybe I could even get Granda to take me over there some weekend to see her grave up close.

  I was used to seeing graves because there was a cemetery right behind our house. It wasn’t as big as Maple Creek, but it was big enough. A stone cement bench sat up there, perfect for playing rummy or jacks on, and an enormous beige hornets’ nest dangled from one of the elm trees. The spookiest feature was a sunken grave that dipped six inches lower than the ground. I imagined a bony finger poking up through the soil and slowly but steadily digging itself out. I hated that grave, but I never went up there without looking at it.

  Dad started yelling for me to get my ass into the house. They were saying the prayer and filling plates. I jumped up and ran for it. If Dad had to call you twice, you got spanked.

  Inside, I grabbed a plastic orange-and-white-flecked plate, a fork, knife, and spoon, and a white paper napkin, and bowed my head for the prayer Papaw was about to recite. My nose started itching, and when I went to scratch it, Dad slapped the back of my head, causing my plate and silverware to clatter to the floor. “Clumsy ass,” he hissed. Everyone looked over for a second and then bowed their heads again. One of us kids being slapped was no reason to stare. My uncle Larry and aunt Betty smiled at me.

  Larry, the youngest of the Peterson boys, was always sweet to his small son, Steve, holding his hand, sitting next to him while he ate.

  Papaw continued the prayer, but the cousins got tired of waiting and started lining up for food. “Respect the goddamn Lord,” Papaw bellowed. Everyone stopped in their tracks until he finished with a soft “Amen.”

  If there is a Lord, I thought, my chin starting to quiver, he sure created a bunch of losers when he pooped out this clan.

  After the food, Dad decided he wanted a picture of his four kids. We lined up according to height just as he ordered us to, facing directly into the sun. The scowling cousins were watching.

  It was four o’clock and the sun was directly over my dad’s head and right in my eyes. I tried to smile in his direction as my dad clicked off four pictures on his new Polaroid camera, but the sun was too bright. Each time Dad clicked the shutter, I accidentally covered my eyes with my hands at the last minute. For the sixty seconds it took for each of those Polaroids to develop, I had plenty of time to imagine what punishment was in store for me for ruining Dad’s “perfect family” pictures.

  “You’re a goddamn idiot,” he yelled at me. “Can’t you stand still for one minute? If you blur one more picture, I’m going to blister your ass.”

  My face was bright red. He’d spanked me many times, not caring where we were or who was looking, and usually he jerked my pants down right there in front of everyone to do it.

  I tried to explain that it was because my eyes were light blue that I couldn’t look directly at the sun, but he interjected, “I’m not wasting any more film on you. Get the hell outta here.” He dragged me out of the line by the front of my shirt.

  What was so confusing was that everyone looked at me as if I had caused the whole mess. I had somehow ruined everything.

  The minute Dad turned his back, I ran for the station wagon, where I lay down on the backseat with tears and spit rolling off the gray vinyl. I cried so long, I forgot why I was crying and fell asleep.

  When I woke up, it was dark. The family get-together was still going strong, so I climbed out of the car and walked home. The lights were on; Jamie was already there. I opened the screen door and headed to my room. I was hungry ag
ain, but it wasn’t worth the effort to scare something up.

  I lay on my bed, searching under my covers for my Casper the Ghost doll. Pulling him up by his arm, I could feel a hole torn in his fur and some fluff poking out. Granda would have to sew it for me. I pounded down his stomach, making a dip to lay my head in.

  Hearing the station wagon pull up, I wondered if Mom would look in on me. She didn’t. Becky came in, tossed a sweater onto her bed, and threw me a disgusted look. I had ruined their day again, by making a scene, by causing Dad to get mad, by so many things I didn’t understand. I was ashamed and angry.

  When I heard Dad open the tailgate of the station wagon, I got up and looked out the window. He pulled his Bell + Howell Super Eight movie projector and his fold-up home-movie screen out of the back. Dad must have shown movies at Mammaw’s. I wondered what I’d missed.

  I lay back down.

  I closed my eyes, but just as I was drifting off, images from Dad’s collection flickered through my head: a tornado demolishing Willard Bank’s outhouse; a train explosion in Dunreath; my uncle Ernie in black rubber fire boots up to his hips wading through a flood near Pattonville, waving at the camera.

  I sat straight up.

  Maybe Dad had filmed Sarah Keeler’s accident. Hers was huge compared to a cow being hit by a Plymouth.

  Dad could hear an ambulance, police siren, or fire truck from a dozen blocks away, and when he heard one, he followed it. Lucky for him, he didn’t have to strain his ears because the police and fire department were within one block of his store. He never missed anything.