Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [58]
But if the stranger was an angel, the angel lied.
TIME FOR ANOTHER GHOST STORY. Then, a little later, another one.
THIS FIRST TALE OF HAUNTING takes place not long after the time the stranger scared my father at the restaurant in Sacramento. Bessie and the boys finally made it back to her parents’ farm in Provo. Frank had already sent a letter there, telling her he was all right and that she should wait in Provo for him. She waited three months, and when he came to retrieve her, his behavior was the same as it had been on similar occasions. He would tell her nothing about the man in the restaurant and why he had run or where he had gone. Later, Fay would tell my mother this much: “I believe that man was one of Frank’s sons, and I believe they went somewhere together to collect something that was owed them.” When Bessie asked Frank about this, he replied: “Don’t go sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”
When Frank came and got Bessie and the boys in Provo, it was the middle of 1946. He had some money and a car, and he said he had some jobs to do. He needed to be on the road by himself for a while, and he wanted to take Bessie and the children back to Fay’s in Sacramento. Frank was worried about his mother. She was seventy-five years old now, and she had been in and out of the hospital a lot in recent years. “Maybe,” said Bessie, “you should be the one who stays with her. Maybe she needs you close to her during this time.”
“Nah,” said Frank. “I wear on her nerves too easily. All she does is bark at me. She likes you and the boys much better.”
So back they went to Sacramento, and Bessie, with Frankie, Gary, and Gaylen, moved into Fay’s large old house on M Street. Frank stayed for a few days, and Bessie thought she saw a new warmth happen between Fay and Frank. It was the only time she had seen Fay act melancholy when it was time for Frank to leave on business. What a shame, thought Bessie. All those years Frank needed Fay, and she withheld her love. Now, when Fay finally wanted a closeness with her son, he acted aloof. It made her wonder if people’s hearts ever truly came together at the same time.
Bessie and the boys took the upstairs in Fay’s house, while the old woman kept her bedroom and parlor in the downstairs area. Frank had left a fair amount of money for everybody to live on, but Fay still insisted on holding her séances. Bessie sensed that these events were starting to drain more and more life from the old woman, and yet she also sensed that Fay could not live without them—that at this point she was summoning the dead as much as a way of negotiating the forestalling of her own death as anything else. Bessie still preferred to be out of the house during these sessions. She would take her sons and sit in McKinley Park until the sky grew dark, then sometimes she would give Frankie and Gary the change for a movie, while she sat waiting at the cafe with Gaylen. Once in a while, though, Bessie would simply keep the boys upstairs at Fay’s home while the séances went on below. It gave her the creeps to be there at those times—there were moments when she could feel invisible presences moving through the house around her—but she didn’t always like being away from Fay at night, given the old woman’s health.
Finally, there came a night when Fay told Bessie that she would be conducting a séance that was a bit unusual. She had a special dispensation, Fay explained, to contact a spirit that had died under the shameful suspicion of murder, and she told Bessie to take the boys to a movie that night and stay out late.
When my mother and brothers came back in the late hours of the night, she found Fay in her wheelchair in the kitchen, looking paler and shakier than Bessie had seen her look before. It seemed to my mother that there was an air of unease