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Then he’ll have to love me.
They will all finally have to love me.
GHOST STORY
Camille
I don’t want him to be lonely. He needs someone. Even I got married. Even I had kids. Not my own, mind. And I only married because I needed someplace to live. But sometimes it doesn’t matter how you get there, it only matters that you do.
My mama died of lady cancer when I was fifteen, then my brother John got a wife who soon filled our little house with babies. I had to get out of there, and I set my sights on an old man who lived at the end of the road. He was alone because he never married, and he was drunk most of the time. But sad drunk, not mean drunk. I wouldn’t have put up with a mean drunk. His house was a mess and, as children, we used to throw our candy wrappers into his yard because we honestly thought that was where all the neighborhood trash was supposed to go. The day after my sister-in-law gave birth for the fifth time in seven years, and to twins, no less, I marched down the road to his door and knocked. He answered, all stooped over, and I said, “I’m Camille and I’m twenty-two and I work hard and I cook good. You got a house and I need a place to live. If you marry me, I’ll take care of you.” Hewas probably too drunk to really understand, but he seemed to think it was a good idea. So we got married. I cleaned up his place, which was just a tar paper house, but it looked pretty nice once I got at it. He was still a drunk, but my cooking and cleaning kept him alive for almost ten more years, and he died just short of his ninetieth birthday.
He was a nice man, all in all. He’d worked for the railroad when he was younger, until his back gave out. He had a photo in a frame of himself with another man, both in overalls with the tracks behind them, and it was the only thing he ever took care of. At first he said the man was his brother. But then he’d get drunk and he’d cry, “I loved that man!” He’d look at me with tears in his eyes and say deeply, as if he really wanted me to understand, “Ilovedhim.” He liked the men, my husband. Or, probably, just that one man. I never told anyone. At that time, in a neighborhood like ours, you didn’t have the luxury of loving anyone you pleased. People would kill you because you thought you had that right.
His name was Lowry, my husband. I had him buried with that photo. I thought he’d like that.
When he died, I started working at the touristy restaurant they called Sea Food Paradise. When it burnt down, people said the live crabs escaped from the tanks and walked with flames on their shells all the way to the ocean. Days after it happened, there came like always the truck with the weekly delivery of cornmeal. Because, for those of you who don’t know it, around here you have to have hush puppies with your seafood. That’s just the way it is. I made so many of those things I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find myself in my kitchen making them in my sleep. Anyway, there was no place to deliver it, and since it was paid for and couldn’t be taken back, the owner sent that damn truck to me. I guess he thought it was some kind of present to keep me happy until he rebuilt, which he did, eventually.He called it theNewSea Food Paradise, as if it didn’t serve exactly the same thing. But in the meantime I was stuck with six big paper bags of cornmeal, almost as tall as me, making my back porch sag with the weight of them.
That’s when it really began. When I started caring for the neighborhood kids. I needed to get rid of all that cornmeal before the weevils and the meal moths got to it, so I got to making a lot of corn bread. It was summer and those kids were hungry. They started coming to my door and I’d give them plates of it. I could tell the children who were going to be okay. They may not have had anything, but they still had a parent, usually a mother, who loved them. Those were the ones who went home after they had their Cammie snack. But then there were the children I knew weren’t okay. Usually skinny boys with big eyes wild with fear, like horses. They’d stay on my porch all day. Some of them showed up at night, quivering like bony branches, and I’d take them in and let them sleep on the couch. Most of them didn’t stay long in the neighborhood, a few years at most, before their families got kicked out for not paying rent, or when the little houses, deteriorating with salt and sand, were condemned. Up the road a ways, some Habitat for Humanity houses were built, and that changed things some in the neighborhood. But here at my end of the street, there was still this unimaginable poor. Most folks in America can’t imagine a world where you don’t havesomething.But I saw it every day, those kids who didn’t have a single thing. So, for all my life of not wanting kids, I ended up with hundreds. I fed them, and I let them know that this was something they had. They had my food. And food is love. They were all colors, because this is a colorful island, but they all had one thing in common. They were skinny, skinny, skinny.
Until my Macbaby came along, as big as a Christmas turkey.
He needs that. He needs to cook for someone who loves him. Heneeds to take care of something other than that cat. She’s a sweet thing, don’t get me wrong. She knows I’m here. Sometimes I sit with her on the couch. But a cat can’t love you like a person. A cat can’t make you whole.
And neither, in case you’re wondering, can a ghost.
GHOST STORY
Camille
It doesn’t surprise me that he’s embarrassed to tell anyone that he misses me so much that he makes this happen. He’s always been afraid of people making fun of him.
Kids used to tease him when he was a boy because he was such a big, dirty thing, always covered in food. His mama had left him alone with all the kid food her food stamps would buy, and he was always sticky with that orange powder from instant macaroni and cheese, which he’d just pour into his mouth because they didn’t have a stove to cook it on. I finally got him to come to me just before school was back in session. I’d cooked that morning before it got too hot. I went to my screen door and yelled “Cammie snacks!” and heard the stomping of little bare feet on my porch. I came out and handed the neighborhood kids the paper plates, and I saw him standing in the middle of the road in front of my house. The children told him to go away, that he didn’t need any food, but I told them to hush and motioned him to me. He stayed long after the others left. I wasn’t surprised.
I was in my eighties when he came into my life. Sometimes I would talk to myself for company, because all my family was gone away and neighbors weren’t close like they used to be. Those little kids loved me, but they didn’t want to talk. They didn’t want to hear about my memories. They were never interested in how I made my food, or the stories behind how I learned. Like how my mama would sing to her gravy to make it thicken, or how she showed me that bacon fat would make butter taste like a heaven no one had ever dreamed of. Or how cornmeal was better than flour because it had weight, and having weight is how you know your worth, so don’t let anyone tell you different. Mac wanted to know, though. He listened, listened, listened, like he couldn’t get enough of it.
When school got back in session, he started staying with me, not going home at all, and I’d wash his clothes and make him grits in the morning and send him off to the bus stop. This went on for weeks before I was mad enough to go talk to his mama about it. Macbaby was a quiet boy, never in the way, never wanting anything but food. He’d sit, all still and shy-like, until I gave him breakfast and supper, never, ever a grabby-grub. How could a mother just let a sweet child like that rot? So I walked to their house, a real old, smelly one set back behind some scrubby palmettos on the corner. When I was a girl, we all said that house was haunted because one of the meanest men I ever knew killed his wife there. Big Willy. We’d tiptoe by the house and whisper, “Don’t get us, Big Willy’s ghost!” I knocked, but no one answered. So I opened the door, a little scared of Big Willy’s ghost still, but there was nothing in there but filth. No electricity, no running water, bugs all over the food his mama had left him weeks and weeks ago. But no mama.
I sat Macbaby down when he came home from school and I askedhim outright, “Where’s your mama, Macbaby?” He didn’t know. She’d been gone for a long time. Well, I didn’t know what to do. Macbaby begged me not to tell anyone. He didn’t want to leave me. And I know it was wrong, but I didn’t want him to leave me, either. So I kept him clean and happy so there were no red flags. But whenever his living situation happened to come up, I would just waltz into that school with some cornmeal sugar crispies for all the teachers, some I cooked for when they were kids, and they’d mostly forget. I told Macbaby that we were just making him slip through the cracks, that’s all. He said he was too fat to slip through the cracks. That made me laugh. He’s got a good sense of humor, my Macbaby.
When he was sixteen, he got his first job, washing dishes at a bakery here on the island. He got good marks in school, but I got the sense he was lonely. He never talked of friends and he never went anywhere other than his job. He started as a line cook when he graduated—a good restaurant job in Charleston because that’s where all the good restaurants were at the time and he was so eager to learn. He would come home at night and couldn’t stop talking about everything that went on in the kitchen. He went ahead and moved to Charleston when he was nineteen. I understood. He was big and the house was small, and the bus from Mallow Island took almost an hour each way. A few years later, he moved back after I fell and broke my wrist. I told him not to, but he did anyway. He got the condo at the Dellawisp, then he went to work at the restaurant in the hotel. When he was promoted to sous-chef, he took me to eat there and everyone treated me like a queen.
He doesn’t have to show me that he loves me. I know he does. I’ve always known it.
Children, don’t hold on to old love so hard you forget to live. Oldlove isn’t the only love you’ll ever have. And I can tell you from this side that it never really goes away, anyway.
So let go.
Whatever you’re holding on to, let go.
GHOST STORY
Lizbeth
So, he’s back. That should make Frasier happy.
Something stirred in me when I saw him, something uncomfortable I didn’t want to think about. Oliver always made me feel this way, even when he was a baby. He never reminded me of his father, Duncan. If he had, it would have been easier. Instead, Oliver has always reminded me ofmyfather, which is strange because I don’t remember what my father looked like. I destroyed every photo of him a long time ago.
If I think very, very hard about it, the only real interaction I can remember having with my father is the one time I was sitting on his lap and he whispered to me that all the men in his family lived to the age of one hundred and three, as if it were a temperature they had to reach. I remember the notion gave me a profound sense of unease, though I don’t recall why.
