Owl Dreams Page 17

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Don’t get many visitors,” Big Shorty said as he escorted the would-be grave robbers to the caretaker’s cottage behind the miniature Gothic-style chapel of Riverside Gardens Cemetery. Sarah understood the scarcity of guests. A giant black man with stumps for legs was likely to have a fairly empty social calendar, especially if he made his home in a graveyard.

  The “cottage” was a prefabricated building assembled on site from metal and vinyl components made in China. The exterior was faux stone with a green corrugated metal roof. Big Shorty had cultivated English ivy around the perimeter to blend the structure with the graveyard’s ambience. From a distance, the effort met with reasonable success. In the light of the crescent moon, the manufactured building looked right at home.

  Sarah knew the cottage would lose some of its artificial charm with the morning sun. Even the most exuberant ivy could not hide its enamel gloss and hard factory edges.

  “Holy ground.” Big Shorty’s voice was deep enough to sing base in a gospel choir, but bore no trace of his ethnicity. He spoke with the clarity and precision of a professional narrator.

  “This cemetery is a border between the worlds of the living and the dead. The chapel keeps out the evil forces of both. That’s why I came. That’s why I stay.”

  The big man lumbered on his stumps faster than Sarah and Robert could walk. There were no exterior electric lights in the cemetery, but he had no trouble following the mulch pathways between the headstones.

  “Put these soft trails in myself,” Big Shorty said. “Easier on the legs than paved roads.”

  Robert tried to ask Big Shorty a question, but as soon as Sarah heard the word amputation, she jabbed him in the ribs and covered with a series of loud, politically correct sneezes. The look she gave Robert

  penetrated the darkness like a roadside flare. She wasn’t sure, but she thought Big Shorty chuckled.

  Bless his heart. Sarah was only slightly ashamed of the patronizing cliché. Some people just don’t know when to be offended.

  The cottage door popped open with a hollow metallic sound as soon as Big Shorty turned the latch. “Frame is warped,” he explained. “Ground shifts as the coffins collapse.”

  Big Shorty’s explanation sounded right to Sarah. The man knew the territory. He was right at home in Riverside Gardens Cemetery.

  “Been here since God was a teenager. Most folks would find it tiresome, but it suits me just fine.”

  The inside of the cottage was spartan. Furnished with a laminated table, four folding chairs, and a couch. There was a kitchen sink, a gas cook top, and a miniature refrigerator that would have been at home in a college dorm room. As far as Sarah could see, there were no electrical forms of entertainment. No television, no sound system, not even a transistor radio.

  Big Shorty hoisted himself onto the couch and gestured for his guests to find what comfort they could in the folding chairs.

  “Doesn’t take much to entertain a man like me,” he said. “When I get lonely, I go outside and listen to the dead.”

  Sarah couldn’t tell if Shorty’s smile was serious or humorous.

  “Loud and clear at dawn and then again at dusk,” Big Shorty said, “but you can hear them anytime if you listen close.”

  Sarah tried to think of some way to get Shorty back on the subject of the paper he removed from Roosevelt Washington’s pocket. Crazy people don’t respond to pressure. Adrenalin makes them crazier. Sarah had a lot of experience with the mentally ill.

  “Did the voices tell you about the paper?” Sarah worked with the care and precision of a spider-wrangler. Nudge the subject gently in the right direction. Whispers rather than shouts. Suggestions rather than demands. A slight tilt in the conversational terrain, and Big Shorty would move where she wanted him to go.

  “You know. The one in Roosevelt Washington’s pocket.”

  It would have worked too, if Robert hadn’t been so happy to find someone else who heard voices. “Do they talk to you? What do they say?”

  Spider wrangler’s rule number one: Work with one arachnid at a time. Sarah tried to think of a way to redirect the topic, but it was too late. Big Shorty was off and running.

  “When ghosts come from the other world, they take the form of birds.” According to Shorty, the dead could choose whatever shape pleased them, as long as that shape had wings and feathers.

  “Can’t be bats or butterflies or mosquitoes. Those are something else entirely. The souls of people take the shape of birds when they come to visit, and they sound like birds when they speak.”

  “How about parrots?” Robert asked. “Parrot’s are birds, and they can talk. So can parakeets and cockatoos.”

  “Now that is something to consider,” Shorty said, “but no bird like that has ever come to Riverside Gardens Cemetery.”

  They sat in silence listening to the souls who were perched in the ivy covering the caretaker’s cottage. There were songs of whippoorwills and doves along with owl calls and warbling sounds of birds that Sarah couldn’t identify.

  After several minutes of listening to the boring conversations of the dead, Sarah made a show of looking at her watch. She nudged Robert and commented on the lateness of the hour.

  “About that paper in Roosevelt Washington’s pocket . . . .” Sarah’s plan only went that far. She looked at Robert, broadcasting as clearly as she could her desire for him to take the topic to the next level.

  Robert reacted by moving his chair a few inches further from Sarah as if a little more interpersonal space would solve her problem.

  “I’ve been wondering.” Robert tilted his head from side to side as though he were using gravity to align the words that would best suit the question he wanted to ask. “How did you lose your legs?”

  Sarah’s heart adjusted its rhythm to accommodate the gushing apologies she expected to be offering within the next few minutes.

  Big Shorty looked at his stumps as if he just realized there was something missing.

  “People hardly ever ask me that,” he said. “All of them wonder, but they hardly ever ask.” The gold cusps on his premolars glittered as his smile filled up the room. Somehow, he managed to be simultaneously terrifying and charming.

  Like a cobra deciding if it’s time for a little snack, Sarah thought. Or a voodoo god waiting for a sacrifice.

  “My people come from the Cookson Hills,” Big Shorty said. “The heart of the Cherokee Nation.”

  Both Sarah and Robert were acquainted with the history of eastern Oklahoma. The region spawned and nourished more notorious criminals than they could count: Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker, Machine Gun Kelly, and Wilber Underhill, just to name just a few.

  “We were colored folk when the locals were in the mood to be polite and niggers when they weren’t.” Big Shorty’s family learned to stay out of trouble by being hard to find, and they had learned that lesson well.

  “Our house was deep in the woods, built to look like native trees. We learned to make our voices blend with the wind and make our fires burn without smoke.”

  Anonymity had been a blessing and a curse. They didn’t get electricity when it became available, and Big Shorty never had any formal education, but lynch mobs didn’t hunt them and the Klan never knew they were around.

  “My great-great-grandpa was the best there ever was at never being found.”

  Shorty’s grandpa came to Indian Territory as a Cherokee freed man, took one look at those hills and vanished without a trace. After the first generation of Cherokee died off, no one even remembered his name.

  “Lived to be an old, old man,” Big Shorty said. “Hid so well even Death couldn’t find him, and Death searched long and hard for almost a century.”

  Big Shorty stopped talking long enough to gaze into Sarah’s eyes and then into Robert’s. “I’m not used to telling people my stories—not living people.” He fidgeted on his couch for a few seconds, licked his lips and then continued with no further apologies.

/>   “We saw Death lurking on the animal trails around our cabin. Found pieces of fabric from his long black gown.”

  Shorty told Robert and Sarah how his family started having second thoughts about his great-great-grandfather. People were supposed to die. Death always had his way in the end, and dark spirits never took well to teasing. Big Shorty’s people started to believe that Grandpa’s antics were the reason for the considerable killing that went on in the hills.

  “We started thinking it was time the old man accepted his fate.”

  Shorty’s father gathered things Grandpa had touched and laid them out for Death to find.

  “My mother collected Grandpa’s hair after she cut it and scattered it around the forest. My brothers and sisters sang Grandpa’s favorite songs. I didn’t do any of those things. To this day I’ve never said Grandpa’s name out loud, and I suppose I never will. But I didn’t try and stop them, and I didn’t warn the old man either.”

  Big Shorty slumped on the couch for a few long moments. He retrieved a blue bandana from his pocket and dabbed at the corners of his eyes. Robert stood up from his folding chair and was about to move to Shorty’s side, but Sarah stopped him with a hard look and a wave of her arm. He sat down again.

  If Big Shorty had two good legs, he might have paced about the little cottage. Any activity would have helped relieve the stress of remembering how his family let Grandpa die. But walking in such a small enclosure was too much effort for a big man with a jerky mechanical stride. Moving the way he did would make his audience nervous. It would shift their concentration away from his story, so he sat on the couch and drummed the fingers of both hands on the leather pads that covered his stumps.

  Robert and Sarah struggled to find a neutral place to rest their eyes. Shorty drummed his fingers for a count of twenty and then he folded his hands in his lap and continued with his story.

  “I knew the exact moment Death found Grandpa. Felt it like a stab in my heart. But the old man’s dying didn’t end things, not by a long shot.”

  From what Shorty had heard, Death was mostly gentle with his victims. When the souls of the newly-dead turned into birds and fluttered off to visit places they had known and loved, Death would look the other way. Sometimes Death allowed the nervous souls to fly about for days before he rounded them up and took them to the other side, but Grandpa had already pushed the Grim Reaper’s patience to the limit.

  “I was collecting deadwood in the forest when Grandpa’s spirit found me. It was fitting that he took the shape of a hummingbird; just like him, those little creatures are hard to find and even harder to catch. I had no doubt about the little bird’s identity because of the white marking on his breast in the shape of a lightning bolt. Grandpa had a scar on his chest the exact same shape and color.”

  Grandpa had loved every member of his family, but he made no secret of the fact that Shorty was his favorite. He taught the boy to hunt and fish and walk through the woods without being seen. He showed him which of the forest plants were good to eat, which would cure illnesses and which would kill. Grandpa had been totally devoted to Shorty in life, and now in death, he asked for help.

  “I knew what he wanted, and I couldn’t turn him down.” Grandpa had no intention of leaving a world he understood for one he knew nothing about. Shorty pulled his shirt pocket open wide, and Grandpa hummingbird flew inside.

  “Back then I had two good legs. I could move faster than a roadrunner. I could out jump a whitetail deer. I was young and strong and certain Death could never catch me, but, of course, I was wrong.” Big Shorty rubbed his stump pads and shook his head in regret.

  “Death’s long black robe didn’t slow him down a bit. He caught me before I could run a dozen steps and chopped off my legs with a single swing of his scythe. He put Grandpa’s soul and my two legs into a burlap bag and flew off to wherever spirits go when they leave this world.”

  Big Shorty had been walking on stumps since that day. As painful and cumbersome as it was, he never let the double amputation turn him into a cripple.

  “I ran through the Cookson Hills when I had legs, tracking game and hunting plants that fill the belly. Now I lumber through a graveyard in search of Death.”

  Robert asked what Shorty planned to do if he ever encountered the Grim Reaper.

  “Wrestle him to the ground and demand he return my legs,” Shorty said. “I’ve been punished long enough for sheltering Grandpa’s soul.”

  Sarah looked into Big Shorty’s eyes. Her gaze was hard enough to make him turn away. She couldn’t tell whether Shorty believed his own story, but was pretty certain Robert did. She’d been with so many crazy people in her life their delusions were starting to seem normal.

  Big Shorty reached into his shirt pocket. For a moment she believed he was going to give her a look at Grandpa hummingbird, but he withdrew a wrinkled piece of notepaper folded into a square.

  “Had you for a moment didn’t I?” Big Shorty grinned at Sarah. He tossed the folded paper in Robert’s direction. “That’s the note you put into the dead man’s pocket.”