Missing May: Part One

Winter’s not helping. February’s a grim time in these mountains. It is pitch black in the morning when I set off down the mountain for the school bus, leaving Ob behind, watching me out the picture window.

I feel adrift. When I was younger, either Ob or May would walk me out to the road and stand there freezing with me in the dark, making me stomp my feet to keep the blood circulating till the lights of the bus would finally bounce off the trees up the ridge and somebody could hand me over to the roaring heater of Number 56.

He looked hard at me. I’d seen that look on his face before. It was the look that always announced he’d gotten some kind of revelation. Ob was a deep thinker and he was often getting revelations.

“She felt like she did when we was packing up to go to Ohio,” he said.
“Like she was going to Ohio?” I couldn’t fathom May taking the trouble of dying just so she could go to Ohio.

“But it kept her in a pickle because she always feared losing her Ohio kin, too. Feared one of them would up and die, unexpected, like her mommy and daddy in the flash flood, if she let them out of her sight for too long. So every so often she’d have to leave this place and go check on them.”

If Cletus gets wind that May’s back, I know he’ll take it and run with it. The last thing Cletus needs is a ghost to dwell on. As if his strange mind didn’t have enough to think about.

“Where you going?” I asked.
“To get acquainted,” Ob answered, and he pushed open the door and went out.

I hadn’t seen Ob interested in one solitary thing since May left us last summer, and here his face was kind of lit up, kind of full of interest and sparkle, as Cletus made himself at home and told us his life story in between showing us the pictures in his suitcase.

It’s those kinds of conversations we’ve been having since November. Speculations about the armpits of Brylcreem men.

He got Ob to sit with him for twelve hours straight putting the puzzle together. Practically all the pieces were brown—brown pyramid, brown sand, brown people. It looked like pure torture to me. But Cletus and Ob were as enthralled as cats in front of a fish tank, so I just kept them happy by cooking five turkey TV dinners in a row and refilling their RC’s.

May would tell strangers where she was from, and I would see her glance up at the sky with a sassy kind of grin on her face when she said the words “Deep Water.”

Ob needed somebody to fill the empty hole she left, and I reckon I thought if I aged about fifty years, I might could fill it for him.

“It’s what they call surreal” he went on. “Taking something real and sort of stretching it out like a piece of taffy into a thing that’s true but distorted. You know. Like old lady Henley’s face-lift.”

“It’s what they call surreal” he went on. “Taking something real and sort of stretching it out like a piece of taffy into a thing that’s true but distorted. You know. Like old lady Henley’s face-lift.”

“You believe in an afterlife, Cletus?” Ob asked, handing Cletus a cup of black coffee. Cletus had dropped by on his way home from prayer meeting. Cletus told us he didn’t go there for prayer. He went there for the doughnuts they always had after the service.

I looked up from the paper on women suffragettes I was writing for history and held my breath.

“I was maybe seven years old,” Cletus began to explain as he settled himself back into the La-Z-Boy. “My grandpa had been real sick and he’d finally died the night before. Next day people were preparing for the funeral and ignoring me in their bereavement, so I just decided to go on down to the river by myself, thinking I’d skip some stones till everything had passed over...."

“Then maybe it’s you who can talk to May for me. She’s been trying to reach me, but I ain’t too good at communicating on her new wavelength. I need me an interpreter.” Cletus gaped at Ob.
“You heard from May?”
“Couple of times,” Ob said.

“Then maybe it’s you who can talk to May for me. She’s been trying to reach me, but I ain’t too good at communicating on her new wavelength. I need me an interpreter.” Cletus gaped at Ob.
“You heard from May?”
“Couple of times,” Ob said.

“Well, I’m no psychic or nothing,” Cletus told Ob. “I feel a connection to the spirit world because I’ve been there—sort of like remembering a place where you once went on vacation. But I never get any supernatural messages or anything. I don’t know any ghosts—personally, I mean.”

“But May didn’t even know Cletus,” I said lamely, making a puny attempt at party pooping.

It was a pitiful sight, the three of us in our overcoats and boots, standing among the dead stalks of winter, hoping for a sign of life from the woman who once had kept everything alive on that soil.

I really didn’t expect May to show up, but Ob’s enthusiasm was so desperate, so sincere in its belief in miracles, that a part of me held out just a little hope that she might fly her soft spirit over us and come gently into our midst.

May had never let us down when she was alive, she’d never not shown up when she was supposed to be somewhere, and it was the memory of her reliableness, I guess, that fueled our wide-eyed optimism.

Ob must have thought that by talking about May there in that place, painting her before Cletus’s ignorant eyes, he could flood the garden with the vibrations needed to draw her to us.

I was kind of surprised at the things Ob picked to talk about. I figured he’d choose the big ones—like her secretly saving up for three years in a row to buy him that expensive plane saw he was coveting over at Sears. Or the year she stayed awake thirty-two hours straight when fever from the chicken pox had me full of delirium, so sick I wanted to die.

I was kind of surprised at the things Ob picked to talk about. I figured he’d choose the big ones—like her secretly saving up for three years in a row to buy him that expensive plane saw he was coveting over at Sears. Or the year she stayed awake thirty-two hours straight when fever from the chicken pox had me full of delirium, so sick I wanted to die.

All Ob and me wanted to do when we lost May was hold on to each other and wail in that trailer for days and days.

May’s funeral turned Ob and me into temporary sort-of socialites, and we never really got the chance to howl and pull our hair out. People wanted us to grieve proper.

So standing there in that bleak and empty garden listening to Ob make May alive again, that seemed to fix something in me that had needed fixing ever since the funeral.