So what? I asked myself. Even if it should be true, so what? Ghosts can’t hurt anyone.
That’s what I thought then.
When I visited Jo’s studio (her air-conditioned studio) after lunch, I felt quite a lot better about Brenda Meserve — she hadn’t taken too much on herself after all. The few items I especially remembered from Jo’s little office — the framed square of her first afghan, the green rag rug, her framed poster depicting the wildflowers of Maine — had been put out here, along with almost
everything else I remembered. It was as if Mrs. M. had sent a message — I can’t ease your pain or shorten your sadness, and I can’t prevent the wounds that coming back here may re-open, but I can put all the stuff that may hurt you in one place, so you won’t be stumbling over it unexpected or unprepared. I can do that much.
Out here were no bare walls; out here the walls jostled with my wife’s spirit and creativity. There were knitted things (some serious, many whimsical), batik squares, rag dolls popping out of what she called ‘my baby collages,’ an abstract desert painting made from strips of yellow, black, and orange silk, her flower photographs, even, on top of her bookshelf, what appeared to be a construction-in-progress, a head of Sara Laughs herself. It was made out of toothpicks and lollipop sticks.
In one corner was her little loom and a wooden cabinet with a sign reading JO’S KNITTING STUFF!
NO TRESPASSING! hung over the pull-knob. In another was the banjo she had tried to learn and then given up on, saying it hurt her fingers too much. In a third was a kayak paddle and a pair of Rollerblades with scuffed toes and little purple pompoms on the tips of the laces.
The thing which caught and held my eye was sitting on the old roll-top desk in the center of the room. During the many good summers, falls, and winter weekends we had spent here, that desktop would have been littered with spools of thread, skeins of yarn, pincushions, sketches, maybe a book about the Spanish Civil War or famous American dogs. Johanna could be aggravating, at least to me, because she imposed no real system or order on what she did. She could also be daunting, even overwhelming at times. She was a brilliant scatterbrain, and her desk had always reflected that.
But not now. It was possible to think that Mrs. M. had cleared the litter from the top of it and plunked down what was now there, but impossible to believe. Why would she? It made no sense.
The object was covered with a gray plastic hood. I reached out to touch it, and my hand faltered an inch or two short as a memory of an old dream
(give me that it’s my dust-catcher)
slipped across my mind much as that queer draft ad slipped across my face. Then it was gone, and I pulled the plastic, over off. Underneath it was my old green IBM Selectric, which I hadn’t seen or thought of in years. I leaned closer, knowing that the typewriter ball would be Courier —
my old favorite — even before I saw it.
What in God’s name was my old typewriter doing out here?
Johanna painted (although not very well), she took photographs (very good ones indeed) and sometimes sold them, she knitted, she crocheted, she wove and dyed cloth, she could play eight or ten basic chords on the guitar. She could write, of course; most English majors can, which is why they become English majors. Did she demonstrate any blazing degree of literary creativity? No.
After a few experiments with poetry as an undergrad, she gave up that particular branch of the arts as a bad job. You write for both of us, Mike, she had said once. That’s all yours; I’ll just take a little taste of everything else. Given the quality of her poems as opposed to the quality of her silks, photographs, and knitted art, I thought that was probably wise.
But here was my old IBM. Why?
‘Letters,’ I said. ‘She found it down cellar or something, and rescued it to write letters on.’
Except that wasn’t Jo. She showed me most of her letters, often urging me to write little postscripts of my own, guilt-tripping me with that old saying about how the shoemaker’s kids always go barefoot (‘and the writer’s friends would never hear from him if it weren’t for Alexander Graham Bell,’ she was apt to add). I hadn’t seen a typed personal letter from my wife in all the time we’d been married — if nothing else, she would have considered it shitty etiquette. She could type,
producing mistake-free business letters slowly yet methodically, but she always used my desktop computer or her own Powerbook for those chores.
‘What were you up to, hon?’ I asked, then began to investigate her desk drawers.
Brenda Meserve had made an effort with these, but Jo’s fundamental nature had defeated her.
Surface order (spools of thread segregated by color, for instance) quickly gave way to Jo’s old dear jumble. I found enough of her in those drawers to hurt my heart with a hundred unexpected memories, but I found no paperwork which had been typed on my old IBM, with or without the Courier ball. Not so much as a single page.
When I was finished with my hunt, I leaned back in my chair ( her chair) and looked at the little framed photo on her desk, one I couldn’t remember ever having seen before. Jo had most likely printed it herself (the original might have come out of some local’s attic) and then hand-tinted the result. The final product looked like a wanted poster colorized by Ted Turner.
I picked it up and ran the ball of my thumb over the glass facing, bemused. Sara Tidwell, the turn-of-the-century blues shouter whose last known port of call had been right here in TR-90. When she and her folks — some of them friends, most of them relatives — had left the TR, they had gone on to Castle Rock for a little while . . . then had simply disappeared, like a cloud over the horizon or mist on a summer morning.
She was smiling just a little in the picture, but the smile was hard to read. Her eyes were half-closed. The string of her guitar — not a strap but a string — was visible over one shoulder. In the background I could see a black man wearing a derby at a killer angle (one thing about musicians: they really know how to wear hats) and standing beside what appeared to be a washtub bass.
Jo had tinted Sara’s skin to a café-au-lait shade, maybe based on other pictures she’d seen (there are quite a few knocking around, most showing Sara with her head thrown back and her hair hanging almost to her waist as she bellows out her famous carefree yell of a laugh), although none would have been in color. Not at the turn of the century. Sara Tidwell hadn’t just left her mark in old photographs, either. I recalled Dickie Brooks, owner of the All-Purpose Garage, once telling me that his father claimed to have won a teddybear at the Castle County Fair’s shooting-pitch, and to have given it to Sara Tidwell. She had rewarded him, Dickie said, with a kiss. According to Dickie the old man never forgot it, said it was the best kiss of his life . . . although I doubt if he said it in his wife’s hearing.
In this photo she was only smiling. Sara Tidwell, known as Sara Laughs. Never recorded, but her songs had lived just the same. One of them, ‘Walk Me Baby,’ bears a remarkable resemblance to
‘Walk This Way,’ by Aerosmith. Today the lady would be known as an African-American. In 1984, when Johanna and I bought the lodge and consequently got interested in her, she would have been known as a Black. In her own time she would have been called a Negress or a darkie or possibly an octoroon. And a nigger, of course. There would have been plenty of folks free with that one. And did I believe that she had kissed Dickie Brooks’s father — a white man — in front of half of Castle County? No, I did not. Still, who could say for sure? No one. That was the entrancing thing about the past.
‘It ain’t nuthin but a barn-dance sugar,’ I sang, putting the picture back on the desk. ‘It ain’t nuthin but a round-and-round.’
I picked up the typewriter cover, then decided to leave it off. As I stood, my eyes went back to Sara, standing there with her eyes closed and the string which served her as a guitar strap visible over one shoulder. Something in her face and smile had always struck me as familiar, and suddenly it came to me. She looked oddly like Robert Johnson, whose primitive licks hid behind the chords of almost every Led Zeppelin and Yardbirds song ever recorded. Who, according to the legend, had