Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

The guest register is complete. Benny Scott is a thorough and fastidious bookkeeper. It took him a long time to pick the registers out of the supply catalog and he is happy with his choice, the black leatherette binding and generous spacing of lines somehow jibing with an unarticulated idea of the essential nature of his motel. Their motel, rather. It would be entirely possible then, if a bit time-consuming, to make a concordance between Josie’s archive of haunted rooms and the immediately previous occupants of said haunted rooms. Which people had slept there the night before the ghost visited the room. Families of four, say, or isolated men on excursions into the land, young couples making their way out of the national park. It would be a simple matter to interview Josie and match up the dates and rooms with Benny’s crabbed notations in the guest register. Such a foray into the woman’s mentality would reveal that, unknown to Josie, her tracking of the itinerant ghost through the Talcott Motor Lodge corresponds to evidence she finds on her morning rounds: material wrapped up in tissue paper at the bottom of the bathroom trash can; a certain scent that greets her when she opens up the doors after checkout time; the tea-leaves sheets. A subconscious equation. The movement of the invisible ghost, as perhaps is only appropriate, is inferred by Josie through the unseen.

The first thing Josie thought when Benny, beaming, that sweet-foolish grin on his face, told her that they were all booked for the weekend of July 12, the weekend of John Henry Days, was that there was no avoiding the ghost. The haunted room would be filled. Benny has come to take Josie’s ghost stories as a joke, what other choice has he, even when holding her arms to keep her from marching out of the apartment to warn a guest in the dark A.M., to tell them to beware, to look out for dancing shimmers, to move to the next room over or sleep with the light on and say a prayer. He has no choice but to make a joke out of it. Yes, she conceded once, the haunted room changes, it is inconsistent, but that isn’t her fault; the ghost likes to mix it up. The rooms of the motel are essentially the same; if Benny were in the ghost’s position, she tried to explain, tied to Big Bend by spectral contract, tied to the motel on the base of the mountain by convenience and ghostly whim, wouldn’t he want to change rooms from time to time, trade the daguerreotype of the Hinton Station in room 13 for the bright cheer of Chessie, the C&O’s feline mascot, smiling from the side of a railroad car on the wall of room 26? (This a thinly veiled reference to the fact that Benny does not get sick of anything, and resists with a certain glum aplomb any of his wife’s efforts to redecorate their apartment.) Seems kind of picky for a ghost, Benny said. Perhaps he’s a member of Triple A, he said, maybe one of their approved hotels might be more his style. Josie threw up her hands. If the ghost moved from room to room, it wasn’t her fault. If Benny wanted to switch chores and make the beds and wash the bedding out back in the cantankerous washing machines, he’d get well acquainted with the comings and goings of the ghost himself. Mr. Comedian had nothing to say to that. With the motel’s high vacancy rate, it is easy to accommodate Josie’s edicts about where a guest can sleep and where he can’t. But if they are all booked up there could be no such finagling. Someone was going to have an unexpected roommate.

None of the guests had ever complained of the ghost when accidentally given the keys to its latest roost. They were lucky, Josie reasons, for the entity’s mercy: the ghost sleeps peacefully next to them, occasionally stealing the covers and leaving merely an imperceptible depression on the pillow, or perhaps the ghost hikes to the next room over, eschewing the hassle of manifestation and its attendant miscreancy. But tonight. She had feigned exhaustion that morning to avoid seeing the face of the unlucky soul who would sleep in the haunted room. She’d spent Thursday on a search and destroy mission against the smell of mildew and dampness, dropping lethal payloads of aerosol roses on the first floor, on the second floor, complained of agonized trigger finger at the end of the day and Benny let her sleep late. She avoided the front office all afternoon, and Benny took her trepidation for pouting over the missing invitation. She let him. He took her fear for a joke. He doesn’t know the ghost like she does.

The first ghost any child of the region hears of is John Henry. Each time a train leaves the Talcott station and rushes into Big Bend Tunnel, the engineer blows the whistle for old John Henry, poor John Henry. His was the triumph of the human spirit, her father told her, and if you dare enter the tunnel you will hear his hammer singing in the darkness. This is the deathlessness of the human spirit, her father told her, fingers in her blond pigtails, which were moist from her chewing. Big Bend is alive with the ghosts of men. The mountain eats the sun and delivers the towns to the ghost world every day.

Her father was the Hinton station man and knew these things; his father was an engineer and had told him these things when he was as young as she was. Her mother told him not to scare her and he smiled. If she’s old enough to stay up later than she’s supposed to, he said, she’s old enough to hear the tales of Big Bend. Men died in the tunnel, he said. His father had helped remove the bodies from the cave-in of 1883, the bodies of men he knew, and where did she think that souls went when they died violent deaths. They linger on angry. And did she hear the whistle blow just now, her father asked and she nodded. That’s the engineer blowing the whistle to ask Big Bend to save his life, to let the train through its big heart of rock.

She has avoided the situation but can no longer. She gets out of bed, no need to worry about waking Benny from his gin sleep. Josie had fallen asleep in her faded pink robe; she puts on her slippers and leaves the apartment to read the guest register. Surely the guests are back from the Millhouse by now. She reads the name of the guest in room 27 and goes to warn J. Sutter of the vengeance of the ghost. She tightens her robe against the night with trembling hands and walks up the stairs. Benny will be angry with her, but he needn’t know. She pads up the stairs. Josie knocks three times on the door. She can see the shred of light at the closed curtains so she knows that the man is awake. She waits and knocks again. She thinks about getting the key and letting herself in to leave a note but decides against it. Benny would really be mad at that. She waits five more minutes for an answer and finally returns to her bed.

Benny is still snoring. Saturday mornings, after Friday nights at Bucky’s, find Benny cranky until the coffee kicks in. He’ll tell her about who he saw at the bar, Rob, Nelson, Arm. She’ll tell him about going to room 27 and he’ll make a joke about it. And maybe she’ll tell him a joke Arm told her once, one she is certain Arm has never told his friend. When Armand Cliff and Josie dated in high school (which Charlotte Cliff had never forgiven her for and which neither she nor Arm had ever informed Benny about, it was before he had come to Talcott), he took her into Big Bend Tunnel, just inside the entrance. They stood in puddles and kissed. She got suddenly scared at the dead space, heard the hammer swinging in the darkness, this insistent pounding, and she asked Arm, what about John Henry. Arm said, you want John Henry? and put her hand on his crotch. Which Josie still thinks is a funny joke after all these years, but she doesn’t think Benny will appreciate it.

Bobby Figgis began his career as a stock watcher for The Wall Street Journal. He possessed an MBA from Harvard and decided to become a journalist to cover the games and strategy of his fellow alumni. He had always had ambitions and now that he had jumped through the hoops his parents had held for him, he was going to pursue them. He wrote small articles about fluctuations in the market that were praised by his superiors.