The Sound of One Ghost Rocking

I have never seen a ghost. But I am pretty sure that I have heard one. My sister Tiffany says that there are at least three ghosts that haunt our childhood home: a Native American, the man with the blue hat (probably my dad’s father), and our grandmother. It is not that I don’t believe Tiffany; she does seem to be the most “sensitive” person in the family, but she has also smoked allot of crack too.

One-day way back in 1986, I found myself in the middle of a summer’s day with nowhere to go and nothing to do. It is a wonderful feeling to be young and have a summer’s day laid out before you. The possibilities are endless. Don’t ask me why I decided to stop by the old Cumming Street house and see my father. Our relationship is famously rocky, and sometimes the mere site of me can stir up a sermon of hellfire from my old man.

“Get a haircut!”
“When I was your age I had a bitching wife and three ungrateful kids!”
“Don’t go running off, I need you to help me take down a big pine in Buckhead.”

I was stupidly optimistic. “Maybe he would be glad to see me this time.” My head told me to turn my little Camero around and go see Barry or Mike or Eric (anybody but him) but my heart kept the steering wheel turned true towards Cumming Street.

When I pulled into the cracked and oil-stained driveway, I noticed that one of my dad’s trucks was not there. This however did not mean that he was not home, trucks appeared and vanished at my father’s house like cards in a magic hat. I pulled my car over into a well-worn dirt spot and walked around the house to find him. Dad usually hung out in the basement. He could usually be found stuffing a sandwich into his mouth or half-asleep in the big blue easy boy recliner with one eye peeking at a football game. I covered my eyes in a salute to block out the glare from the sun, and peered through the big glass doors into the living room. The place was quiet and he was nowhere to be found. The Cumming Street house (or 281 as my brother and sister called it) was never locked, so I slid back one of the misaligned glass doors and stepped into the cool basement. “What a relief!” “He is not here” My brain was jumping for joy. I had dodged the dad bullet.
I sat down in my dad’s lazy boy and kicked it all the way back to maximum lazy. The heat of the sun was magnified by the glass in the doors and hit me like one of Elvis Presley’s downers. For the next couple of hours I rested. The world was silent, still and deep. Then I heard the drip.
I did not want to get up. I felt like the Cowardly Lion with a head full of poppies. “Poppies…sleep…sleep poppies.” I went through all the stages of grief about the drip:

“I do not hear a drip” - Denial
“Please don’t let there be a drip” - Pleading
“Goddamn it there is a drip” - Anger
“I better get up and fix the drip” – Acceptance

I reluctantly got up and went to the downstairs bathroom. The sink was dry as a bone. “It must be the kitchen sink.”, I thought and pounced confidently into the kitchen. “Nope…the basin is dry here too.”
“The drip must be from upstairs”, I quickly deducted and stomped heavily on each of the old wooden stair steps as I made my ascent.
“Fuck, …no drip in the upstairs bathroom either”
“Has to be the kitchen sink”, I said out loud but my hypothesis was quickly disproved.
“Shit, where in the hell could that sound be coming from?”

It was then that I noticed the closed door down the hall. No one ever went into the sewing room. My aunt and grandmother had used the little room to iron clothes and maybe crochet a doily or two. Suddenly, the synapses in my brain sensed a connection. The sewing room was directly over where I had been sleeping. The drip was coming from this room.

For the better part of my childhood, at least the part that I can remember, my grandmother had been sick. She had lost one eye to cancer when she was a young girl, and eventually lost sight in the other one as well. My grandfather died in 1973, and with each year that passed she grew increasingly bitter and lonely. Each morning as I left for school I would go upstairs to say “Good Morning” to her and my aunt. She rarely left the red rocking chair she used to wait out her time to Beulah Land.

“How are you doing today Mama Ruby?”
“Oh Doodle, I think I am going to die”, was always her response.

Our “good morning” routine played out everyday until I was nineteen years old. “How are you doing today Mama Ruby?” “Oh Doodle, I think I am going to die”, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Well one Saturday morning in 1985 she was right, she died. She had a stroke in the kitchen and died right there on the blue linoleum with my aunt, brother and me in attendance. Her last words to me were, “you want me to die”.

The old worn red rocking chair that Mama Ruby spent the last twelve years of her life in remained still in the house long after she had gone. There was no way that you could walk by it without thinking of her. Some days it was all that I could do not to rush past it on my way downstairs. I was sure that if I looked quick enough, she would be sitting there rocking, a dribble of snuff strolling down one corner of her mouth. It took some time but eventually my father got rid of the rocker and replaced it with a green one. It felt as if a weight had been lifted off of the house and now it was ready for new memories.

A feeling of dread washed over me as I looked down the hall at the closed sewing room door. I felt as if I were in one of those Twilight Zone episodes where the hallway keeps getting longer and you have to run to catch the door. My fear was unexplainable. I had no reason to fear that room. It was the month of June and the day was strong, bright and warm. Feelings like mine were more suited to autumn months and the dark, moody weather that accompanies them. I felt stiff as a statue as I walked down the hall to the end room. A brief moment of clarity took hold of my mind, and called me a silly goose for making such a grand and dramatic thing of opening a door. I could not help but laugh at myself and after taking a considerate pause; I flung open the door like a cop with a warrant.

I could not breathe. I had found the source of my noise; only it was not a drip. It was a creak: the creaking of my grandmothers red rocker moving back and forth on the yellowed pine floor.

“How are you doing today Mama Ruby?”
“Looks like I am dead, Doodle…..looks like I am dead…”