A Skeptical Spirit

by Albert E. Cowdrey

As we’ve seen many times (most recently with “The Overseer” in our March 2008 issue), Albert Cowdrey excels at Southern tales of the supernatural. This month he offers us another such yarn, a light-hearted tale that turns askew one of the great conventions of the ghost story genre.

Albion Merkel may have been a bit mad, but that was par for the course in the small Delta city of Bonaparte, Mississippi, whither (as they say in old novels) he had removed (as they also say in old novels) after Hurricane Katrina erased his ancestral diggings in Biloxi.

He purchased a moderately historic cottage called Smith’s Haven in Bonaparte’s Olde Towne, near the kudzu-draped bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River and there installed himself, his dog Miss Scarlett (named for American fiction’s most famous bitch) and a load of water-marked furnishings rescued from the wrack and ruin on the coast.

Behind his new-old dwelling’s lichened brick walls, shielded from the street by azalea hedges and half a dozen red and white crape myrtles, he filled his days with gardening, with business—which consisted almost wholly in suing his former insurance company—and with his lifelong hobby, psychical research. In that department, everything looked hopeful. Bonaparte was richly supplied with ghosts. Spirits clumped about invisibly on wooden galleries, or whistled “Lorena” on winter evenings, or passed through walls where doors had once stood, or wept for lost lovers on moonlit nights, or frightened fornicators in the Confederate cemetery.

Unfortunately, they avoided Albion’s cottage altogether. Even Miss Scarlett, who far surpassed him in the ESP department, after carefully examining the house did not find a single blank wall to growl and bristle at. On the other hand, for the first time in her pampered life, she chose to lie outdoors all day, making her nest under an azalea bush in the patio close by the garden gate, where she slept from dawn to dusk, rousing herself only to gulp meals and bark at the sixteen or seventeen vehicles that constituted Bonaparte’s rush hour.

To Albion this seemed significant. Something made his new home unattractive to dogs and spirits. But what? He made the mistake of asking his housekeeper, an up-to-date black woman who’d returned to her Mississippi roots after thirty years in California in order (she said) to escape the traffic.

There was already a certain amount of tension between them. Placenta Wilson was the only cleaning lady he’d ever had who addressed him as “Baby,” a term that seemed to put their relationship on an uncomfortably physical basis. (Placenta? Baby?)

Her attitude about spirits was equally disconcerting. Briefly removing from her lower lip the cigarette that usually hung there as if sutured, Placenta knocked some ash onto Albion’s mother’s gate-leg table, brushed it from the tabletop onto a saltwater-stained Persian carpet that couldn’t get much more damaged anyway, and stated flatly that her son Antwon didn’t believe in spirits.

“And what does he know about it?” snapped Albion.

“Well, he teaches computer science at Mather,” she said, naming a small but extremely upscale private college in New England, as if that settled the matter. Then she bustled away about her duties, wiggling the round bottom that decorated her minimal frame like an olive on a toothpick.

“Utter irrelevancy,” Albion muttered. What did computers have to do with spirits, anyway? As he liked to tell his new acquaintances in Bonaparte, he recognized that Placenta stood superior to most members of the cleaning-lady profession—he just wished she wouldn’t keep reminding him of it.

He put the problem of his ghostless condition to a new acquaintance, Mrs. DeFlores, one afternoon when they were having tea in the back parlor of her mansion, Cottonwood. An eighty-two-year-old widow who’d married into the town’s feudal aristocracy, she yielded to none in her attachment to the old ways, and often seemed to converse in the language of 1900, if not earlier. Thus she told Albion that he needed to consult a “darky” she knew, who was a medium.

This was the first time in half a century that Albion had heard anybody say darky without winking, and he found it particularly remarkable since he knew that Mrs. DeFlores had been born Mabel O’Dowd in Philadelphia, PA. Sipping his Earl Grey, he reflected briefly on the rumors that swirled around the lady—one, almost certainly false, that she kept a slave in an outbuilding; another, hopefully true, that Cottonwood possessed (or rather was possessed by) a veritable costume ball of ghosts. According to Albion’s barber, they had names like Captain Jack and Mister Dick and Darlin’ Sissy, and there was even a famous hunting dog of a few generations back called Powderhorn, who could be heard baying on moonlit nights.

If that was true, Mrs. DeFlores’s recommendation of a medium might be worth following up. Albion had just opened his mouth to tell her so, when something began thumping violently inside the wall behind her chair. She murmured a word of apology, set her cup down, picked up a walking stick leaning against the wall and banged away vigorously, at the same time shouting, “Now captain, you stop that! It’s safe—I’ve told you a million times, it’s safe!”

The noise inside the wall stopped. She returned the stick to its place, and asked Albion if he’d care for a sugar cookie.

“I’d rather know who’s in there,” he told her. His voice trembled a little, not with fear but with the joy of a lepidopterist who spots a new kind of butterfly.

“Oh, just old Captain Jack. You know in 1863? When General Grant came through Bonaparte on his way to burn Jackson? Well, the captain was away with the Confederate army, so Darlin’ Sissy, who was his wife and a lot smarter than anybody else in the family, including him, broke through the plaster and hid the family silver inside the wall. Then she had her Negrahs turn the room into a bedroom and set up the bed so the headboard concealed the opening. When the Yanks arrived, she invited General Grant to spend the night, and he slept in that very bed, keeping the silver safer than anybody else could have!

“Then Captain Jack was captured at the Battle of Furnace Creek, after getting wounded in a place we won’t discuss. Out of gratitude for Sissy’s hospitality, General Grant paroled him and sent him home, and she put him in that same bed and nursed him until he died of complications. To comfort his male ego, she told him he was guarding the silver just by lying there. Unfortunately, after he died he kept on trying to guard it, even when the war was over and Darlin’ Sissy had taken it out again.

“She was a great hostess, Mr. Merkel, especially after her post-war marriage to Mr. Dick, her brother-in-law who’d joined the Republicans and made lots of money, bless his heart. She needed all the silverware she could lay her hands on for her famous sit-down dinners for eighteen or twenty-four. Captain Jack to this day remains a man of few ideas but very tenacious, and raises a fuss whenever he happens to notice for the umpteenth time that the silver’s gone. It’s really hard dealing with such a stupid man, and I must say that death has not improved him.”

Albion was enthralled. “This darky,” he said, “the one who might be able to tell me why my house isn’t haunted—would you give me her name?”

“Her name,” said Mrs. D., “is Cyrene Foxx.” (She pronounced it Sy-reeny.) “I’ll give you her cell phone number before you leave. She is one of the old sort, Mr. Merkel, and you might consider employing her in place of Placenta, a fine and intelligent woman who is, unfortunately, very modern.”

Albion nodded. He felt fairly sure that one of the old sort would not call him Baby. His hostess concluded the tea party with some words of warning.

“Cyrene worked for me a few years back, and she was an excellent housekeeper and made the most marvelous spoonbread. Yet I had to let her go. She’s a physical medium, you see, and the way things flew around was quite distracting. Also, without meaning to do so, she stirred up the ghosts and made it hard to get a good night’s rest, what with Powderhorn baying at the moon whether there was a moon or not, and the captain hammering on the wall, and Mr. Dick calling for someone to muddle his toddy, and Darlin’ Sissy (usually the most thoughtful of women) playing “Aura Lee” over and over and over on a piano I sold years ago because it was full of sour notes.

“I’m warning you about this, Mr. Merkel, so you won’t complain if things get a little strange down in Smith’s Haven. Cyrene is a true Christian and in Heaven will undoubtedly be a lot whiter than either one of us, but should you decide to employ her, you deserve to be told that having her around is not all gravy by any means.”

Interviewing Cyrene and ridding himself of Placenta took Albion less than a week. Placenta departed in anger after telling him, “What you want to work for you, Baby, is a nigger.” She lifted her upper lip and almost snarled the forbidden word.

Which wasn’t true at all. What he wanted—what he’d always wanted, he now realized—was a darky, specifically one attuned to the spirit world.

Cyrene certainly qualified for the dark part. Her skin had the almost ebonized finish so rare nowadays among African Americans, most of whom tend toward beige or latte. She was a small, leathery woman who dressed in surprisingly up-to-date pantsuits and went about her work with vigor. When she was ready to leave, Albion asked if she had detected any spiritual presences in Smith’s Haven.

“No, Mr. Alby, I didn’t. There is a force here, however.”

“What sort of force?”

“I don’t know, not yit, anyways. But it centers in the liberry.”

“What library?” he asked, never having noticed one.

“Up there,” she said, pointing at the living room ceiling. “I can just feel the weight of all them dusty old books, pushing down. Well, here’s my daughter to ride me home,” she added, as an enormous SUV drew up to the curb. “See you next Tuesday.”

Albion knew that a respectable attic topped his house, for the A/C man had climbed up there to “check out them ducks and fillers.” Aside from the existence of ducts and filters, however, the owner of the house knew nothing about what lay beyond the trapdoor in the hall ceiling.

Now, with some effort and the aid of a hooked pole, he pulled down a folding staircase and ascended slowly and cautiously until he reached the dusty planking of the attic floor. A good seven feet high in the center, the space would have been easy to traverse except for a clutter of retired furniture and the ducts, which coiled this way and that like foil-wrapped anacondas from their origin in a large metal box. A louvered ventilator at the back of the house admitted a brownish twilight.

Cautiously, Albion stepped over various sections of the anaconda until he spotted, tucked into the shadows beside the cobwebby brick chimney, an old armoire with a rusty scrolled key projecting from its door. To the accompaniment of falsetto complaints from the lock and hinges, he swung open the door and found inside four shelves of, yes, dusty old books.

He used his handkerchief to clean the seat and arms of a battered armchair that stood conveniently close, then sat down and began pulling the books one by one off the shelves. They were in every sense weighty stuff—old medical standards like Gray’s Anatomy plus many works of skeptical and/or materialistic philosophers. Democritus, Hume, Voltaire, Marx, Spencer, Huxley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Santayana—all were here. Besides the big guns of disbelief, Albion found books by lesser known figures—La Mettrie’s Man a Machine, d’Holbach’s System of Nature, Diderot’s Essays. Flipping through the latter, he discovered that someone had heavily underlined the Frenchman’s brutal view that “mankind will never be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” In the margin the same somebody had penciled, “Yes!”

Oh, good Lord! thought Albion, his heart sinking.

No wonder ghosts shied away from Smith’s Haven. Albion had bought and settled down in a house once occupied by an ardent and committed skeptic, and everybody knew how the delicate structure of ectoplasm shrivels before disbelief like a flower in a frost. But who could the malignant unbeliever have been?

On their next meeting, Mrs. DeFlores welcomed him again to the back parlor of Cottonwood, but instead of store-bought cookies fed him brick-like chunks of home-made banana bread that dropped into his stomach like sash weights.

Bravely uttering little grunts of counterfeit pleasure, Albion put his hostess in the mood to supply him the information he needed. When he felt she’d been warmed up enough, he told her about the library, and asked who it might have belonged to. Maybe Smith, the original builder?

“No,” she said thoughtfully. “In his day, Mr. Smith was a Presbyterian elder. Some quite respectable people are, you know. No, I would think the books belonged to Doctor Welch, who lived there just recently.”

“Recently?” he asked doubtfully. It turned out that Mrs. DeFlores had her own notions of what constituted recentness.

“Yes. During the 1920s, I think. I used to hear stories about him in my younger days. When he first arrived in town, everybody was glad to see an enterprising young man take the place of old Dr. Thayer, who didn’t believe in germs because he’d never seen one. For a while, Dr. Welch enjoyed quite a substantial practice. Then stories about his rather aggressive and defiant irreligiousness began to get around. One expects doctors to be skeptical, of course, it comes from thinking about bodies all the time—they start to believe the soul must be a secretion of the adrenal glands, or something. But the way he made an issue of the matter did him no good in this town. We are in the Bible Belt, after all. In time new doctors arrived that people trusted more, his practice declined, and in 1928 he shot himself.”

“Shot himself?”

“Not with a gun. I suppose the correct phrase is shot himself up. He injected poison—hyoscine, I think. Do have another piece of banana bread, Mr. Merkel. It’s so nice to find someone who appreciates my baking. Not everybody does.”

That night Albion took two tablespoonfuls of Mylanta at bedtime instead of his usual one, but had peculiar dreams anyway. Nigel Bruce appeared (as Dr. Watson) but Basil Rathbone (as Holmes) kept calling him Welch. After some obscure chitchat, Holmes took out his famous hypodermic and injected himself with cocaine, remarking as he did so, “I have solved the riddle of the universe, Welch! God’s secret is that He’s a secretion.” Welch burbled along in Watson’s usual fawning manner, exclaiming “Pure brilliance, Holmes!” then morphed into a lapdog and began licking Albion’s face.

He woke up. It was seven a.m., and Miss Scarlett wanted to be let out. It was time for her to bark at the morning rush hour, and go back to sleep.

After breakfast, Albion put on old clothes and returned to the attic. Searching for a clue as to how to proceed, he began slowly leafing through volume after volume of Dr. Welch’s collection. Clearly, he’d been a man of forceful and uncompromising views. Scribbled in the margins of every book were his opinions, which were never less than emphatic: “Yes! No! Damned fool! Unscientific! Even that ass Benjamin Franklin knew better than this!” The skeptics themselves had rarely been skeptical enough to suit him: he meted out praise as sparingly as the cook at a Victorian workhouse doling out porridge. One of the few who gained his wholehearted approval was Democritus, whose icy view (in De Rerum Natura) that “nothing exists but atoms and the void” caused Welch to exclaim, “Yes!!!!!!”

It was all rather discouraging. When Cyrene showed up for work on Tuesday, Albion told her about his discoveries and asked whether she knew how to lift the cloud of unbelief that hung over the house. She said, well, they could try to contact Dr. Welch in the hereafter and ask him to help them lift the spell. Albion was dubious.

“He seems to have been pretty hard-nosed,” he pointed out. “I’m not sure he’d want to help anybody.”

“Oh, he wasn’t all bad,” she said, somehow flipping a bedspread so that it settled down in neat folds, like a military flag at sundown. “He was a mighty proud and scornful man, yet he doctored poor folks and wouldn’t take no money for it. Black or white, didn’t make him no never-mind. He looked after my mama when I was born.”

Albion stared. If Mrs. DeFlores had her dates right and Dr. Welch had shot himself up in 1928, then Cyrene had to be at least 79 years old. Yet every day the woman did enough physical labor to weary a couple of dock workers.

“He delivered you?” asked Albion incredulously.

“Well, not delivered. Mama just kind of drapped me when nobody was expecting it. But he come by the house afterwards and saw to her health and mine. Oops.”

Something had flitted across the room. Albion looked here and there in bewilderment—had a sparrow flown into the house?—then spotted a Haviland dinner plate balancing uneasily on the edge of his chest of drawers. Cyrene retrieved it, dusted it, and put it back in its usual place on the sideboard in the dining room.

“Plates is the liveliest things, sometimes,” she muttered, returning to the bedroom.

“Now, as to contacting Dr. Welch: I charges fifty dollars for a séance, and I can’t be responsible for any breakage caused by sperrits. If that’s acceptable, Mr. Alby, I think I got Sunday evening open. My daughter Altuna says it ain’t religious to summon sperrits on a Sunday, but what does she know? She belongs to the Apostolic Fire-Baptized Church of God in Christ, and spite of the fancy name, none of those folks knows much. Oh, damn.”

The plate had silently returned and now rested on Albion’s pillow.

“That’s so mischeevious,” she said, frowning. “Now I know who’s doing it. It’s my little boy D’White David. I named him for General Eisenhower, hoping he’d grow up strong and brave, but he got whooping cough and passed in 1952 when he was only six. He been following after me ever since.”

“He’s not afraid to come into this house?”

“Not as long as I’m here,” she said. “If I wasn’t, he wouldn’t come in here even if you offered him a Tootsie Roll.”

Albion agreed to the Sunday evening séance. Then, because he felt uneasy around children, never having had any of his own, he went outside and sat in the patio and rubbed Miss Scarlett’s belly until Cyrene left, with (he supposed) D’White David clinging invisibly to one leg of her pantsuit.

That weekend Albion had just finished watching 60 Minutes when his bell chimed, and he found a triad of visitors standing on his porch.

“This here’s Cousin Gordon,” said Cyrene, leading the group indoors. “And this is Cousin Na’teesha. They works with me. And you don’t have to worry bout the money, Mr. Alby—the price is the same, come one, come all.”

Cousin Gordon was an enormous black man who wore workmen’s attire, even though it was Sunday. “I takes care of the Methodist Church,” he explained, his hand swallowing Albion’s like a pelican ingesting a minnow.

Cousin Na’teesha was plump and fortyish, attired in a variety of fluttery garments and carrying an alligator purse. She had a soft voice almost devoid of Bonaparte’s traditional Peckerwood drawl, and shrewd, watchful eyes.

“Now the question is where,” Cyrene muttered. She walked slowly through the living room, asking, “Y’awl smell anything in here? Like ether? I noticed it when I was cleaning.”

She tested the dining room, the hallway, and the second bedroom that Albion was in process of converting into a study. In the end she returned to the living room and briskly ordered Cousin Gordon to move a small table beside the fireplace and bring in four chairs from the dining room. Albion felt cautiously impressed: the table was now precisely under the library in the attic. Cyrene ordered them to sit down and hold hands while she invoked a blessing.

“Some folks think we shouldn’t do this on the Sabbath,” she informed God in a confidential tone, “but I can’t find nothing against it in Scripture.” (That was intended, Albion supposed, to settle Altuna’s hash.)

The lights were low. Na’teesha’s hand felt small, cool and a little moist, while Gordon’s was huge, calloused and dry. Cyrene muttered and gabbled to herself, most of the words unclear, though once she asked rather loudly, “How far to the other side?”

Maybe it was a signal, for Albion felt a pull at his left hand. He looked up at Gordon’s mountainous form and noticed for the first time that he too was asleep or entranced, breathing softly and regularly through his mouth. Was this a whole family of mediums? If so, how did they split up the work?

As if answering his question, quite suddenly a woman’s voice began to emerge from Gordon’s lips.

“This here is Aunt Sally,” the voice announced in the cracked tones of age. “Is that you, Natty? Oh, and there’s Cyrene, too. Who’s the white fella? I once knew everybody round Boney Part, but he’s a new one on me. How’s the weather down by y’awl?”

“Kind of rainy,” said Na’teesha. “How is it where you at?”

“Very bright,” said Aunt Sally. “Very, very bright.”

“That’s nice. I guess you’re over the clouds there, so you get lots of light from the sun.”

“Not from the sun,” said Aunt Sally. “Our light comes from the Son.”

“Praise God!” exclaimed Na’teesha. “Now, Honey, much as I’d love to visit with you a while, this gentleman is paying fifty dollars to contact a certain person name of Welch used to live in Smith’s Haven.”

“There I can’t help you,” said Aunt Sally. “I remember Dr. Welch a little bit, but he ain’t up here with us. Come back when you got more time to chat, okay, Na’teesha?”

The next twenty minutes were largely wasted, as a parade of unwanted spirits took the stage. A medieval archer babbled in Middle English; an Irish servant girl who’d died of typhoid in nineteenth-century New York gave thanks she’d never again have to “scrub them damn front steps”; a repentant Storyville whore praised her Redeemer; a U-boat crewman denounced die gottverdammte Engländer who’d killed him with a depth charge in 1943.

One by one Na’teesha dismissed these annoying wraiths, repeating over and over that Dr. Welch, of Bonaparte, Mississippi, was the only person wanted. And at last, with a suddenness that made Albion jump, a precise and cutting baritone emerged from Gordon’s lips.

“Why are you people practicing your superstitious folly in my house?” it demanded.

Na’teesha responded, “Will you identify yourself, please?”

“Peter Paul Welch, M.D. Doctor Peter Paul Welch,” he added, in case those present were too dense to understand the M.D. “May I ask again what the devil you’re doing in my surgery?”

“You practiced medicine in this room?”

“Madam, I practice medicine here every day. And I don’t rent out space for strangers to put on absurd mummeries. Belle, show these intruders out.”

“Doctor Welch, do you recognize the lady seated at your left?”

Silence followed. Then: “She seems … oddly familiar.”

“Her name is Cyrene Foxx, formerly Cyrene Brown.”

“That’s quite absurd. Cyrene Brown is an infant.”

“No, Doctor Welch. She’s eighty years old.”

“Are you insane?”

“You’re dead, Doctor Welch. You died eighty years ago. You’re a ghost.”

Surprisingly, Welch’s tone softened. “My dear woman, I must apologize for my earlier asperity. I see now why you’re in my surgery. I suppose worried family members brought you here. However, you should know that I’m a general practitioner, so I can’t treat your mental problems. You need to see an alienist. Unfortunately, this benighted town doesn’t possess one, even though most of the people are crazy. Try Charity Hospital in New Orleans.”

Albion bestirred himself. “But she’s right,” he protested. “You are a ghost.”

“Two cases of lunacy on the same day!” exclaimed Dr. Welch. “I wonder if it’s catching. Could it be some sort of toxin? Hm. Have either of you eaten any moldy rye bread lately? Open your mouth and say ah. Take off your shirt, sir—I’ll need to palpate your abdomen. Are you, by any chance, seeing double? This is turning out to be an uncommonly interesting day.”

Albion was getting angry, something that his peaceable temperament seldom allowed him to do. But he found Dr. Welch’s impenetrable wrong-headedness hard to take. “YOU … ARE … A … GHOST!” he almost shouted.

“Now, now, now. We can’t have any violence. You’re clearly in need of a sedative. Belle, my dear, ask Jim to stop weeding the garden and give me a hand. I need him to hold somebody down.”

But they never got to meet Jim, for the two mediums had had enough. After some mumbling and heavy breathing, Gordon awoke from his trance. Shortly afterward Cyrene came to as well with a burp that caused her to beg everyone’s pardon. While Albion turned up the lights and served coffee, she and Gordon listened closely to Na’teesha’s account of what had gone on while they were “under.”

Cyrene thought that “Jim” might be Jim Joe Johnston, a notorious black gigolo of a few generations back, who’d worked at gardening whenever the supply of women willing to support him temporarily gave out. “Belle” was a poser. Maybe a long-forgotten nurse? “The doctor, I don’t think he had him a wife. Mama said he’d been disappointed in love, being left at the altar by some gal had a fit of common sense just before it was too late.”

Albion still hadn’t gotten over the impact of Dr. Welch’s antipathetic personality. “Can you imagine a man who’s been dead for eighty years insisting that he’s still alive?” he demanded.

Cyrene agreed that eighty years was a long time to go on fooling yourself. “But you know, Mr. Alby, ghosts do tend to cling to the past, being kind of leftovers themselves.”

“Look at little D’White,” Na’teesha offered. “He won’t never move on and enter the Light until Cyrene passes over and takes him by the hand.”

“He always was a clingy child,” Cyrene agreed.

“And,” said Gordon, speaking for a change in his own voice, which resembled a tuba solo, “look at all them sperrits been running round Cottonwood for a hundred and some odd years. Miz Sissy stays on because she was a sociable climber, and that was where she clumb the highest. Mr. Dick and Captain Jack stays around for the same reason dogs follow bitches. Why old Powderhorn stays, I’m not sure. Ain’t no real bitches there I know of.”

“It was good coon hunting round Cottonwood at one time,” said Cyrene. “Before they built that new condo development out back, and the Wal-Mart moved in.”

As the triad was leaving, Cyrene—carefully folding Albion’s check—gave him a last bit of counsel.

“I’m afraid you got you a problem, Mr. Alby,” she said. “You gonna have a hard time getting Doctor Welch to see sense and move along. He got a good side, like I told you, but at bottom he’s a strong man and he’s a wrong man, and that’s a bad combination. Strong and wrong,” she repeated, shaking her head. “That’s tough to deal with.”

Albion was still brooding over the results of the séance when he had a telephone call from a neighbor. Placenta had applied for a cleaning job to Mrs. Lucy Jeter, who lived down the street, and Mrs. Jeter was checking her references. He had no problem saying that she was a good worker and honest and trustworthy. Since Mrs. J didn’t ask about excessive familiarity or modernity, he didn’t bring up the negatives.

A few days later he saw Placenta on the street, and she hailed him like an old friend. “Baby, that was so good of you, telling Lucy all those nice things about me,” she said warmly. “Especially after we had that little run-in between us.”

After that, they exchanged chummy greetings whenever their paths happened to cross. One day she told him her son Antwon was coming for a visit and asked if she could bring him by. (“And I’ll leave the smokes at home,” she promised.) Albion had no particular urge to meet a computer nerd who, he felt, was likely to be as big a bore as such people usually were. But in line with his basic essential laziness, he said, “Certainly,” because that was easier than saying, “No.”

Thus, one evening his doorbell chimed again, and he greeted the duo of Placenta and Antwon Wilson. Antwon was thirtyish, as skinny as his mother but lighter in hue, and while she was neatly attired in skirt and blouse, he dressed like a true academic sloven. A triangle of torn T-shirt showed beneath his prominent Adam’s apple, and a duo of unmatched socks peeped between the cuffs of his baggy tweeds and his battered L.L. Bean loafers.

“I knew a guy named Merkel in Providence,” was Antwon’s opener. “He was a Communist and I used to sleep with his sister. Would they be relatives of yours?”

This did nothing to get things off to a good start. After denying any relationship whatever with the Rhode Island Red and his sluttish sister, Albion served wine, crackers, and cheese—a domestic Brie, the best available in Bonaparte. Antwon ate it in big, expensive gulps, commenting as he did so that he never bothered to taste what he was eating because “it’s just fuel.”

Searching rather desperately for a topic of conversation, Albion mentioned that he’d discovered the library of a doctor previously in residence at Smith’s Haven. This brought a double-barreled putdown from Antwon, first of Dr. Welch (“Oh, an old horse and buggy doc, eh?”), and then of books in general.

“Can’t see why anybody reads ‘em any more. I don’t. Good Lord, it’s like communicating by snail mail.”

Forced to defend his obnoxious ghost against his equally obnoxious guest, Albion pointed out that opportunities to get on the internet had been rather limited in 1928, when the doctor died. Antwon conceded the point: “Good Lord, 1928. That was back in the Nixon Administration, wasn’t it?”

Placenta, who was no fool, saw how things were going and hastily brought up Albion’s family history, of which he was inordinately proud. With little cries of interest and delight, she nudged him into admitting that the Merkels had long been pillars of the Gulf Coast—back when there was a Gulf Coast, that is. He could have discoursed very happily for a couple of hours on his exact place in the vast web of southern cousinage, except that Antwon’s face had taken on a zombielike thousand-yard stare. So, sighing inwardly, Albion did his duty as a host and asked about the Wilson family tree.

It turned out to be complex. Like most southern families, the Wilsons counted both black and white relations. Placenta claimed DeFlores blood—from Captain Jack the Confederate, not from Mr. Dick the Scalawag, who unlike his brother had been a deadly foe of interracial coupling. She referred to the current Mrs. DeFlores as “the Yank.” Placenta’s own Mama, Felice, had been the result of further mixing. After her birth, Placenta’s grammaw Isobel had been visited by the Klan demanding the name of the father, which she refused to give, even under threat of death.

At this point, noting that Antwon was again imitating a zombie, Placenta broke off her genealogical lecture.

“You don’t like to hear this kind of stuff, do you, Baby?” she asked, at last bestowing the term where it was appropriate.

He shook his head. “There’s a lot I don’t know about where we came from. And there’s a lot I don’t want to know.”

This sentiment depressed Albion more than anything else the young man had said. How could anybody be uninterested in his origins? After the Wilsons left, he was stacking cups and plates in the dishwasher when the phone rang. It was Mrs. DeFlores, inviting him for tea and banana bread. Of course he accepted, reminding himself to buy another blue flask of Mylanta at the Wal-Mart on his way to Cottonwood.

Making chitchat, “the Yank” then asked him in her best gracious-lady voice what he’d been up to lately.

“Getting a look at the future,” he said somberly, thinking of Antwon.

“Oh, so now it’s crystal balls?” she chortled. “My, you do get around. What did you see in the future, Mr. Merkel?”

“A blank page,” he answered. “A brick wall.”

All night he wrestled with the Dr. Welch problem, but without reaching any useful conclusions. He needed an exorcist, yet doubted that even the Jesuits in the movie could accomplish much in this case. Expelling Beelzebub from Georgetown was one thing. How would they get rid of a ghost who denied even being a ghost?

For lack of alternatives he returned to the attic and the armoire. He’d already gone through every book but one, the last volume on the lowest shelf, whose technical subject and off-putting title (Parasitic Worms) had caused him to avoid it. Picking it up now, he noticed at once that it felt too light. He opened it and discovered that the book had been carefully hollowed out and turned into a hiding place for three string-tied bundles of fading letters.

Feeling the kind of excitement that long ago had made Peeping Tom put his eye to a crack in his shutter, Albion untied the first bundle. The top letter, postmarked Aug. 16, 1923, was on faded blue stationery embossed with the name of Miss Juliette Grinder in fancy script.

My Darlingest Poo-poo, it began. A flapper you call me, in your darling pompous way! Did anyone ever tell you you’re a young fuddy-duddy? Yes dear Heart I am a flapper, even if not “five foot two, eyes of blue” as in that song you hate so much. But I am as loyal and true to you as the other Juliette was to what’s-his-name in that play you made me read. I dream every single night of you—dreams that leave me faint yet tingling with an ardent warmth that previously I had only read about in books by French authors.

This kind of thing went on for quite a while. The letter was signed For Ever and Ever, Your Joo-joo.

This hinted at a Peter Paul Welch, M.D., of whom Albion had known nothing. Hands trembling, he unfolded letter after letter. The romance had begun when Dr. Welch was in his final year at Tulane Medical School. Papa says you must have your Degree and a Situation as well, before we can be wed. Well, hurry on and get the dam’ degree then! I can’t wait forever and neither can you, if I can judge by the tendency of your trousers to form a tent when we are necking together! (Aren’t I a bad girl, though?) And don’t worry so much about money, my dear one. Papa is a mean man in some ways, yet I have been wrapping him around my finger since I was a little girl, and I know he will help us out.

Apparently she was right, for Welch’s graduation had been followed by the purchase of a small but lucrative practice in Bonaparte from an elderly doctor who was retiring. (Presumably the one who’d never seen a germ.) Welch took up his duties, but the wedding was again put off. Joo-joo’s Papa wanted to be sure his prospective son-in-law would make a success of his chosen career, and packed off his daughter to Europe on the SS Carnatic for a luxurious tour to delay things a while longer.

The result was disaster. The last letter was typewritten on legal letterhead and signed in a bold, slashing hand. The writer was Julie’s Papa, and the letterhead proclaimed him to be Alfred M. Grinder, Attorney-at-Law.

“I had thought, Welch, that my generosity in loaning you the money to obtain a practice might open the way to a marriage between yourself and my daughter. Needless to say, the infamous conduct of which you stand accused has rendered that forever impossible. My daughter, sir, will not enter a bed only just vacated by a Negress—worse, a Negress whose bastard brat you are accused of siring. Who do you think you are, young man—Thomas Jefferson?”

Much more followed, and it was no kinder than the opening. Grinder made threats of exposure and legal action and even a possible lynching. “The laws against miscegenation are not the only thing you have to fear, though the mere accusation would ruin you professionally. Good old fashioned frontier justice has not died out in the community where you reside. Suppose you were publicly accused of being a traitor to your race, what might happen to you then? Reflect upon it, Welch! I want my money back! And I intend to receive it, together with such interest as I may choose to demand of you. You will, sir, pay for your conduct—pay through the nose.”

My ducats and my daughter, thought Albion. Who said that, anyway? Shylock?

Exactly at this moment—sitting in the brown shadows of the attic, inhaling the dust of a bygone scandal—two names he’d recently heard popped out of nowhere into his mind, fused and became one. Belle! Isobel! Placenta’s mother Felice had been Welch’s daughter by his black housekeeper, Isobel (alias Belle) Wilson!

*

The second séance held at Smith’s Haven was not quite a duplicate of the first. Albion had communicated with Placenta, and the information he could now give her about her own ancestry was enough to insure that she would be present.

Antwon was another matter. “I’ll see if I can twist his arm,” was the best she could promise. The twisting must have succeeded, for the two Wilsons—one looking determined, the other sullen—turned up that Sunday evening in time for the festivities.

Cyrene greeted them with marked reserve. Apparently Antwon had done no better job of endearing himself to black Bonapartians than white. Albion knew that Placenta wasn’t too popular either, on account of her California airs. (Once in his presence Cyrene had referred to her as “the Sunset Stripper.”)

A larger table was needed, so this time they sat in the dining room, Cyrene remarking that “It ain’t Ground Zero, but it’ll have to do.” Antwon was placed between his mother and Na’teesha, Albion as before between Na’teesha and Gordon, while Cyrene clasped hands with Gordon and the Sunset Stripper.

As the preparations went forward, Antwon’s expression seemed to be progressing from sullen to rebellious. But Gordon gave him a grim, lowering glance and the teacher of computer science at least held his peace.

As before, lesser spirits had to have their say. Aunt Sally revealed that the Holy Trinity was as big a mystery to the dead as it was to the living. A Swiss ski instructor who’d just perished in an avalanche uttered a string of incoherent syllables from a mouth still full of snow and Germanic consonants. Either Edith Piaf or somebody who sounded remarkably like her sang a few bars of Non, je ne regrette rien. A Jacobean roisterer made the room tremble as he roared out denunciations of the Puritans as “slubberdegullion druggels,” whatever in the world that meant.

As before, Na’teesha disposed of these intruders briefly and decisively, until Dr. Welch’s cold tones cut through the babble.

“You two not in straitjackets yet?” he demanded. “What can the authorities be thinking of?”

Na’teesha nodded significantly to Albion, who cleared his throat and nervously began the dialogue. “Dr. Welch,” he said, “I assume you remember Belle Wilson?”

This produced so long a silence that Albion was afraid that the line to the other side might have, so to speak, gone dead.

“Yes,” said Dr. Welch finally.

“Allow me to introduce you to Placenta, her granddaughter, and Antwon, her great-grandson. Your granddaughter and your great-grandson.”

“My … my what?”

“I believe,” said Albion, with a coolness he was far from feeling, “that you understand me perfectly well. I trust you won’t compel me to read to this company from Julie Grinder’s letters, nor from that particularly nasty letter written by a certain attorney-at-law—”

“No!” shouted the spirit. “Have you no shame?”

“Have you no shame? When in 1928 Klansmen visited Isobel Wilson—your Belle—to discover the name of her child’s father, she refused to hand you over to them, even though they threatened her life. But others, including your white fiancée’s rather dreadful Papa, had learned the secret, I suspect from Dick DeFlores, who had a nose for such things. Was that when you decided to take the easy way out, leaving a poor black woman to raise your daughter alone?”

Silence again. But Albion, after a lifetime of being nice, had finally located the anger button in his psyche, and pressed it.

“Speak up, man!” he commanded. “Speak up!”

“Yes,” said Dr. Welch. From the changed tone, Albion could almost feel the spirit metaphorically squaring his shoulders.

“That was what I did. I admit it. My whole life had suddenly come apart and I acted out of fear for myself, and no thought for her. I thought death meant annihilation. I thought I’d never be called to account. I thought I’d escape from danger and shame into the void—into nothingness. Well, I was … I was … I was … wrong.”

At this crucial admission, Na’teesha, Placenta and Albion all exhaled. But the sigh of relief was interrupted when Antwon jumped to his feet, knocking his chair over backward.

“You son of a bitch!” he shouted. “You lousy pimp! You swine! You scum!”

“Now, Baby,” said Placenta, tugging at his sleeve. “It was all a long time ago.”

Baby was having none of that. For a thirty-year-old man, Antwon managed to throw a tantrum that might have won respect from an ill-natured two-year-old. His language wasn’t as inventive as the Jacobean roisterer’s, but he did his best with the banal four-and-five-letter invective of modern times. Placenta kept trying to stop the flow of denunciation, but Albion preferred to let it run, feeling that it was doing Dr. Welch less harm than he deserved.

Finally Antwon burst into tears, probably tears of rage, and ran from Smith’s Haven with Placenta in his wake. Na’teesha, having sat open-mouthed during the scene, turned to Albion and said, “I never thought little old Numb Nuts had it in him.”

By this time the mediums were waking, stretching, returning to the world that is sometimes termed real. Feeling that something calming was in order, Albion opened a bottle of Cabernet that he particularly treasured because it had survived Katrina, and poured small glasses all around. When the events of the evening had been retold and digested, Cyrene suggested they bow their heads, join hands, and offer a prayer for the repose of Dr. Welch’s soul.

“He had good in him, you know,” she said, almost apologetically. “He just never let it come out enough, is all.”

As the guests were leaving, she hung back for a moment and whispered to Albion, “His soul is finally in flight, I hope toward his Redeemer. Your house is clean now, Mr. Alby, I mean spirit-wise. Otherwise it needs a good dusting. See you on Tuesday.”

With the departure of Dr. Welch’s tormented and denying spirit, other and gentler ghosts gradually began to show up, probably drawn by Cyrene’s mediumistic powers.

That perpetual six-year-old D’White David was a thoroughly exasperating brat. Albion had to lock up his mother’s good china—presumably D’White could pass through the walls of the china cabinet, but he couldn’t get the plates and cups out—and keep buying new Wal-Mart dishware to eat from, as D’White broke one set after another.

Other spirits were much more agreeable. From time to time around midnight Albion’s mother appeared in his bedroom to check and make sure he was properly tucked in. His father was sometimes to be seen gazing longingly at the wine rack, for spirits had been his problem long before he became one. A mysterious Blue Lady took to floating down the hall; she resembled the only woman Albion had ever seriously considered marrying—considered so seriously and long that she married somebody else, in fact three somebody elses in succession, before dying. But the image was faint, the ID dubious, and the Journal of Psychical Research rejected an article he did on her as “unproven.”

Most mournful of all the ghosts was a mysterious flickering blue creature that Mrs. DeFlores positively identified as Powderhorn. He frequently trotted over from Cottonwood (or whatever gait dead dogs use to go visiting), favoring autumn nights when the dry leaves rustled like passing spirits and the huge brilliant harvest moon sucked the starlight out of the sky.

Then, with Miss Scarlett watching him, fur bristling on her nape, he sat and pointed his muzzle upward and in long, moaning, sobbing howls expressed his yearning for the life of the flesh that was, sadly, forever beyond his reach. Eternity, he seemed to be telling Albion, wasn’t all gravy either.