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By Root 412 0

The BYU football team had won a game earlier that evening, and the players had made the trek to light up the Y on the side of Bessie’s mountain. My mother was thrilled that I got to witness this ritual. We sat there and watched the burning Y until it faded into a bare glow. A few minutes later, from down the road in the direction of Mary Brown’s old farm, we saw something white emerge from the darkness and move our way. As it quickly got closer, it seemed to float about a foot off the ground. Above its white form—which now looked like a gown, rippling in the night breeze—we saw two eyes, looking our way, glowing. Bessie and Melissa stood up at the same moment. “It’s the ghost,” my grandmother said, and my mother took me by the shoulders and steered me into the house. I wanted to go closer—I had never seen a ghost before; I wanted to see what it would do if you moved its way—but Bessie and Melissa would not allow it. So I watched for a while from the front window. After we moved inside, the apparition stopped advancing toward the house. It moved back and forth across the road several times, like it was waiting for something to happen, or like it was studying us. Then, after a minute or two, it took off, moving quickly back into the night it had come from. Later, when I told my father about the ghost, he laughed. “That was no ghost,” he said. “It was probably just a neighborhood dog that had pulled an old white shirt off a laundry line and was looking for somebody to show it off to. What you saw were the silly superstitions of old Mormons.”

THE NIGHT AFTER THE APPEARANCE OF THE GHOST, my grandfather Will Brown died at age seventy-three. At his bedside were his church bishop, his wife, and all his living children. I don’t remember feeling much about his passing at the time—after all, I never got to meet the man—but thirty-some years later, when I read Melissa’s final journals, I came across a simple passage that broke my heart. Melissa’s last few notebooks were tedious, as hell to read—page after page after page about knitting doilies for grandchildren, or cooking roasts for guests, or dusting knickknacks. Even her reportage of her husband’s stroke was dully matter-of-fact. And then, noting Will Brown’s final night, Melissa wrote five words about his slip into darkness: “Watched him die. So hard.” After reading those words, I never took those people’s feelings lightly again.

Will Brown’s funeral was reportedly one of the biggest that Provo had witnessed in years. Apparently, everybody had revered the old school janitor. For some reason, all the grandchildren—and various other tots-were seated in the first few rows of the church, right in front of my grandfather’s open casket. It was the first time I had ever seen a dead person up close. I studied Will Brown’s white hair, trying to feel something. Mostly, I just felt horrified at having to look at a dead man. There was something unreal about staring so long at death, something that felt forbidden, like looking at raw sex—except death, I later realized, was far nastier.

Later, a long line of limousines and cars rode out to the Provo City Cemetery. We stood around a freshly dug empty grave, and my grandfather’s coffin rested alongside the deep hole. Wreaths had been draped across the casket and, one by one, Will Brown’s children approached the coffin and added single flowers to the pile. When my uncle George’s turn came, he seemed to fumble, looking for a place to put his flower. Finally he dropped it on the pile, and the boutonniere glided gracefully into place alongside the other flowers. It seemed to me at the time as if my grandfather had reached up from death and pulled the rose down to him. I have thought about that image many times over the years, and it has appeared frequently in my dreams.

As we were walking away from the grave, I stepped accidentally on a headstone. Then, deliberately, I stepped on another and another. Maybe I was trying to dispel some of the fear I felt, being so close to the dead. I don’t really know. It was a childish and irreverent thing to