The Ghost's Grave

CHAPTER ONE

The night I moved in with Aunt Ethel, she shot a bat in the kitchen. If there had been anyplace else for me to go, I would have headed back to the airport right then. Of course, if I’d had a choice of where to spend the summer, I would never have trudged into Aunt Ethel’s house in the first place.

After a plane ride from Minneapolis to Seattle; a shuttle ride downtown to the Greyhound bus station; and a long, bumpy bus ride to Carbon City, I saw Aunt Ethel for the first time.

She met me at the bus station. It wasn’t really a station—there was merely a sign in the window of the Carbon City Market: BUS ARRIVES AND DEPARTS HERE. ASK FOR SCHEDULE.

While the bus driver unloaded my bag and my box of books from the luggage area beneath the bus, I glanced around. Carbon City wasn’t much of a city. The Market was a small general store, flanked by an empty building that had the words CARBON CITY HOTEL, 1911 embedded in its bricks, and by a post office the size of a bathroom.

A scattering of houses backed up to the hills on either side of the road. In one yard a faded FOR SALE BY OWNER sign looked as if it had been there long enough to grow roots. Next door, tall grass had grown up through the spokes of a discarded bicycle, and a black cat dozed on the hood of a car that had no tires. Dusk darkened the street, making it seem dreary, but I suspected Carbon City would be bleak in full sun, too. The town matched my mood.

You can put your gear in the back, Aunt Ethel said, pointing across the street to an old red pickup truck. Rust spots dotted the truck’s dented sides, and strips of duct tape held the rear window together.

The truck had seen better days, and so had Aunt Ethel. Her face was as lined as a road map. She wore a shapeless pink cotton dress, a brown cardigan sweater with holes in the elbows, and sturdy laced shoes. White hair, which looked as if she trimmed it herself, formed an irregular cloud around her head.

Mom had warned me not to be guilty of ageism. Being elderly doesn’t mean she won’t be interesting.

She’s seventy years older than I am, I had said. What will we talk about?

Ask about her childhood. Ask her about the history of Carbon City; it’s an old coal-mining town.

As I climbed into the truck, I thought the complete history of Carbon City would probably take at least two minutes. I noticed the bus driver quickly turned around and headed back the way we’d come.

I put my backpack on the floor, then felt over my shoulder and on the seat for my seat belt.

Did you drop something? Aunt Ethel asked as she turned the key. The truck made a grinding sound.

I’m looking for my seat belt.

Don’t have any. I bought my truck long before seat belts were invented.

Hoo boy, I thought. Mom will have a fit about this.

Aunt Ethel turned the key off, pumped the gas pedal a few times, then turned the key on again. The grinding sound returned.

Fleas and mosquitoes! Aunt Ethel cried. This is no time to be temperamental. She whacked the dashboard with her fist.

The grinding sound quit as the truck roared to life, belching a cloud of black smoke into the street. Apparently, the truck was built before emissions standards, too.

I didn’t try to make conversation on the drive home; I was too scared to talk. Riding with Aunt Ethel made the thrill rides at the state fair seem tame. Her truck straddled the center line of the road, even when we went around curves. The engine backfired regularly, a loud Bang! Pop! noise. Each time it happened, the truck jerked forward erratically. Wondering whether Aunt Ethel had ever bothered to get a driver’s license, I clenched my teeth and braced myself for the crash.

Luckily, we met no oncoming cars, a clue that nobody else went where I was headed. We banged and popped our way out of Carbon City, up a wooded hill, and past an old cemetery. We curved first left and then right and finally turned down a long gravel road.

When my nerves were totally frazzled, we lurched to a stop in front of an old two-story wooden house. By then the darkness was complete, with no street lamps or neighboring lights to serve as beacons. The run-down house loomed in the headlights, the perfect setting for a horror movie.

Here we are, Aunt Ethel said.

The truck gave a final hiccup as I lifted my suitcase out. I followed Aunt Ethel into the house.

The second she turned on the light, Aunt Ethel screamed. Let me tell you, that woman’s voice is louder than a fire engine’s siren.

I jumped, then dropped my suitcase with a thud.

Open the doors! she yelled. Hurry!

What’s wrong? I reached behind me to open the door we’d just closed.

There’s a bat in here. Get it out! Out!

I followed her gaze upward and saw a bat circling the ceiling fan.

While I ran from room to room, looking for outside doors to open, she grabbed a broom and chased the bat.

Mom had once told me, Bats get a bad rap. People should encourage bats to stay, not chase them off.

Aunt Ethel did not encourage her bat to stay.

Whoosh! Whoosh! She swung the broom at the bat as it zigzagged above us.

Aunt Ethel’s house has high ceilings, so her broom couldn’t reach the bat, but she looped it overhead in figure eights anyway.

I opened the kitchen door and flipped a light switch, illuminating a patch of grass and a flower bed. Maybe if we leave him alone, he’ll fly out by himself, I said.

And maybe he won’t.

I couldn’t argue with her logic.

Mom says bats are good, I told her. They eat mosquitoes.

Well, this one should have eaten his mosquitoes outside, Aunt Ethel said. "I don’t want any bat landing in my hair."

It seemed unlikely the bat would want to land in her hair, with her head bobbing up and down and twisting back and forth like a roller coaster as she watched him.

The bat flew around the living room; Aunt Ethel leaped on the sofa and waved the broom at him.

I knew that some people have irrational fears of harmless creatures. Mom freaks out when she sees a spider, and my best friend back in Vermont was scared of garter snakes. Apparently Aunt Ethel feared bats.

The bat swooped into the kitchen.

That does it! Aunt Ethel hollered. I will not allow bat droppings in my kitchen.

She flung the broom to the floor, ran upstairs to her bedroom, and returned with a shotgun.

I followed her to the kitchen, trying to talk sense into her. If we turn off the lights in here and leave the porch lights on, he’ll probably fly out one of the doors.

She raised the gun, then swayed from side to side as she tried to keep the bat in the site.

Aunt Ethel! No! You’ll blow a hole in the house.

BAM!!

I may never hear well again. The shot reverberated through the kitchen, out the front door, and probably all the way back to Minneapolis where, three short weeks earlier, I had been an average twelve-and-a-half-year-old boy, dreaming of playing on a summer baseball team and leading a normal life. Now I’d moved in with a lunatic.

When my ears quit ringing, I opened my eyes, which was the first I realized I had squeezed them shut. I didn’t have to ask if Aunt Ethel had hit her mark. Blood spattered the front of the kitchen cabinets. The refrigerator looked as if it had the measles. Red dots covered the floor like confetti. How could one little bat contain so much fluid?

I didn’t see a hole in the wall. I didn’t see a dead bat, either. Had she only wounded him? Was he now flapping about in the living room, dripping blood on the furniture?

Did you kill him? I asked.

Of course I killed him. Your auntie’s a crack shot. She closed the kitchen door that led outside, removed her sweater, and poured herself a drink of water.

Where is he?

She pointed. He fell on top of the cupboard. I’ll have to get the ladder.

While I dampened a paper towel and used it to mop bat blood from the stove burners, Aunt Ethel left with the gun and returned with a rickety yellow ladder. She took a plastic bag from a drawer—I assumed it would be a bat body bag. She climbed up the ladder until she could see the top of the cupboard.

Hmm, she said. She stepped to the countertop and peered at the back of the cupboard.

Is it there? I asked.

The bat fell down behind the cupboard, she said.

What? How could it?

The cupboard doesn’t hang straight. It’s tight at the bottom but not at the top, so there’s space between the back of the cupboard and the wall. The bat fell down in that space, and it’s lodged back there.

I eyeballed the cupboard from the side; she was right. The cupboard top stuck out from the wall about an inch. There wasn’t room to reach down behind it. How are we going to get the bat out of there?

We aren’t.

I gaped at the white-haired woman who stood on the kitchen counter. Her pink cotton dress was so wrinkled, I wondered if it doubled as her nightgown.

You’re going to leave a dead bat behind the cupboard?

There’s no way to fish it out, short of tearing the cupboard off the wall. The bat’s dead, that’s for sure, so we’ll let it rest in peace behind the cupboard.

Won’t it smell?

If it starts to smell, I’ll deal with it then, she said. She climbed down, put the ladder away, and started washing the refrigerator.

Shouldn’t we close the front door? I said. We wouldn’t want another bat to come in.

I shut the door when I went after the ladder.

I finished cleaning the stove and started wiping spots from the floor. I wanted to say, Wouldn’t it have been simpler to wait for the bat to leave? Instead, I worked in silence.

The truth is, I felt sorry for the bat. It hadn’t hurt us. It made one little mistake—flew down the chimney or something—and because of that one small error, it got blown to smithereens and left to rot behind the kitchen cupboard.

I remembered a bat book, Stellaluna, that my second-grade teacher had read to the class, and I thought about Mom telling me bats are good. The more I replayed the incident, the more unhappy I felt. Through no fault of its own, the bat was in the wrong place.

Like me, I thought. Through no fault of my own, I was stuck with Aunt Ethel for the next two months. It was a stretch to even call her a relative. She’s the great-aunt of my new stepfather, Steven, which makes her my Great-Great-Aunt Ethel, but that’s too much of a mouthful. Besides, there wasn’t anything great about her that I could see. Nothing great about where she lived, either.

I inquired about the area while we scrubbed the kitchen floor, and what I learned did not brighten my mood. The closest movie theater was eighteen miles away, in the town of Diamond Hill. So was a decent grocery store. As for renting a video, forget it. Even if there had been a video store nearby, which there wasn’t, Aunt Ethel doesn’t own a VCR or DVD player. She doesn’t have a computer, either. No e-mail, no Internet.

What about television? I asked. "You do have a TV, don’t you?" If I couldn’t play baseball this summer, at least I could watch it.

TV’s a waste of time. My sister had one, but the programs were junk, so when she passed on, I donated the TV to the Diamond Hill Hospital’s thrift shop. Any news I need, I can hear on the radio. Most of it’s so depressing, I’m better off not knowing.

No TV. I felt fortunate to have electric lights and indoor plumbing.

The summer stretched before me, one blank calendar square after the next. I understood now why Mom had not objected when I brought my box of books, all my CDs, and my CD player. She and Steven must