William Gay: Little Sister Death

Through the glass door of the telephone booth he watched the patrons of the bar going about the serious business of the day’s drinking, Pauline’s voice a reassuring buzz in his ear, businesslike. Somewhere out there in the world folks were still doing things.

Look, she told him. If you can’t write the damned thing then you can’t write the damned thing. Put it aside, work on something else. Begin another novel.

Binder smiled into the phone but the smile felt strange on his face. Right now I don’t know another novel, he said.

All right. Then don’t write one. Did you save any of the money?

Very damned little.

Then you’ll either have to go back to work or write something saleable. You’re a writer, aren’t you? You said you were. A compulsive writer? If a compulsive carpenter couldn’t build a Moorish castle he could still build a chicken coop. Even with a chicken coop there are variations in quality.

What do you mean?

Write a genre novel. Write Shootout at Wild Horse Gulch or Trixie Finds Love in the Bahamas . Write something we can sell to the paperback house. Write a horror novel. The two books I’ve seen of yours have that mood, those overtones to them anyway. The softcover racks are full of horror novels.

I don’t know if I could do that or not.

Are you saving yourself for posterity or what?

I guess I don’t know if I can do it.

Well, Pauline said, a shrug in her voice, you’re a writer. It’s your decision to make.

I’ll write you in a day or two and let you know.

By the time he got back to his beer and the ballgame, his mind was already busy thinking of a ghost story. He couldn’t focus on the ballgame. He always enjoyed reading M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House was one of his favorite novels. Binder, in his youth, had always been interested in the supernatural, had felt some deep and nameless affinity for the questions that did not have any answers.

Halfdazed from the heat and from the beer he’d drunk Binder went into a used bookstore on Clark and began to browse. He bought a halfdozen books from a shelf marked OCCULT ARTS AND SCIENCES, selecting volumes with no criteria save their titles, choosing those with ghost or haunting or poltergeist, passing over those on astrology and spiritualism and out-of-body contact. With the paper bag of books under his arm he turned into the first bar he saw and ordered a Hamm’s, took it and the books to a back booth under the air conditioner, and studied them critically.

Not much here. Ghosts in American Houses. Fifty Great Ghost Stories . He hesitated on an oversized paperback, for the title stirred some memory he had lost. The book was covered with thick red paper, typescript in black, no illustration. It had been published by some house he had never heard of, one he guessed was out of business long ago, or perhaps the book had even been privately printed by a vanity press.

The Beale Haunting by J. R. Lipscomb. J. R. Lipscomb was not given to modesty, Binder figured, for the book was subtitled: The Authentic History of Tennessee’s Mysterious Talking Goblin, the Greatest Wonder of the Nineteenth Century .

He opened the book and with a shock of recognition saw an ink drawing of a girl, buxom and distraught, the words beneath: VIRGINIA BEALE, FAERY QUEEN OF THE HAUNTED DELL.

He suddenly remembered the Beale haunting, saw immediately that fate, coincidence, and synchronicity had played into his hands. This had happened in Tennessee, two hundred miles and a hundred years from his home. He remembered an old issue of Life magazine from his childhood, a Halloween number with an article called “The Seven Greatest American Ghost Stories” or something of that nature. There had been two pages on the Beale haunting.

That night he read the book cover to cover, then lay sleepless thinking about it, his brain striving to postulate a solution. It grew in his mind, tolled there some evocation of familiarity until he found himself obscurely homesick for a place he had never been.

The book was amateurish and extravagantly overwritten and mawkishly sentimental in its treatment of the Beale family and their travails, but Binder was fascinated. It was a clear case of material transcending style. On the surface it was a story of a family’s relocation from North Carolina to Tennessee in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a piece of history of the Tennessee wilderness, a story of pretty, teenaged Virginia Beale, whose wellordered life was shortly to be shattered. The tale deepened and darkened with the advent of the haunting and the ultimate descent into madness and bloody violence. Beneath the surface it seemed to Binder saturated with erotic Freudian symbolism, and he wondered if anyone had ever read the book in quite that way before.

He had to write a book about it; it seemed an unmined wealth of material. He wanted to let his mind play with the facts, rearrange them to his whims, find answers to the questions of rationality the book raised. A plan had already begun forming in his mind. He was burnt out on Chicago, had no desire to be here when the hot brassy summer changed to wind and snow.

The next day he bought an atlas of road maps. There it was. Beale Station, Tennessee, population 2,842. He could hardly believe it. The story had read like a dark fairy tale. It was like looking on a map and finding Magonia, leafing through a telephone book and finding a listing for Borley Rectory.

Beale Station, 1982

The real estate agent was named Greaves. He was a heavyset man in hornrimmed glasses and he had the professional gladhanding air of the successful businessman about him. He sat behind a desk littered with deeds and plats and advertising brochures, chainsmoking Lucky Strikes and drinking tepid coffee out of Styrofoam cups.

Yes, sir, he said. If banker Qualls told you that then he told you right. I have the only section of the Beale farm that’s available at any price.

The banker said the place had been split up quite a bit.

Oh my, yes. Originally it was over sixteen hundred acres, but that was way back in the eighteen hundreds. The only remaining section that could be called the Beale farm runs only sixty-two acres, but the house has been continually maintained and I guess you could call it the old homeplace.

The house? You mean old Jacob Beale’s house? I understood that was torn down years ago.

No, no. Well, the original log house was torn down, but Beale had another house built, a better one. He lived there until his death and then his son lived there. Of course the house has been renovated, wired and plumbed and that sort of thing. Are you interested enough to drive out and take a look at it?

That’s why I’m here.

Greaves arose. And that’s why I’m here, he said.

Outside it was blinding hot, the sun searing white off the decks of parked cars. The sky was a bright cloudless blue. Binder paused to put on sunglasses, Greaves clipping dark lenses over his spectacles.

We’ll go in the Jeep, Greaves said. The road’s not real good going in.

On the way Binder tried to find out all Greaves knew about the Beales, but the real estate agent professed to know very little at all. Or any Beales either, there being none remaining in the town that had been named for them. Greaves was handling the property for a descendant in Memphis, a great-great-granddaughter who was not even named Beale anymore.

Binder rode in silence then, watching the country slip past, the ends of cornrows clocking past like spokes in a neverending wheel, fields of heat-blighted corn segueing into dusty fencerows of sumac and honeysuckle and elderberry, all talcumed alike with thick accretions of dust from the slipstreams of passing automobiles. Here and there a tidy white farmhouse tucked well back from the road in the shade of a grove of trees, a distant tractor slowmoving and noiseless, towing a great wake of white dust.