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Ghost Riders
by Linda Baker Fradin
I stopped looking up at the sky when I was seven. It was the day my parents played their new 45 rpm record of the Sons of the Pioneers singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” I vowed never to raise my head, never to take the chance that I might see myself or someone I loved in the shape of clouds riding behind the doomed cowboys, the ghost riders, forever chasing the “Devil's herd of cattle” through the sky.
Eyes glued to earth, never daring to look up, did I obsess about death? I gave it a lot of thought. My first experience with death came less than a year later with red lights of an ambulance flashing on the cowboys riding their horses through the sagebrush and cactus patterned on our bedroom wall. My sister, Kathie, leapt from her bed to mine and off the opposite side to be first to the window. We kneeled, resting our chins on our arms crossed on the sill, settling in to watch the excitement. We were accustomed to spying. Our next door neighbors rented rooms to people our mother called “the characters who come with the season” to the racetrack in town. But the ambulance had come for no race track boarder. It was old Mr. Mallow, our neighbor, brought out upon the stretcher, lying quite still. Mr. Mallow was a kindly, quiet old man, always surrounded by a cloud of sweet- smelling pipe tobacco. Earlier in the spring of that year, raking damp winter leaves from the garden, I had uncovered a dead rabbit. Hearing my screams, Mr. Mallow had rushed to my rescue, carrying the rabbit away without a word.
We never saw Mr. Mallow again, and, sad though we were, his death did inspire our entry in the Lions Club Parade on the Fourth of July. With our older sister, Karen, Kathie and I covered my red, pedal-powered Fire Chief's car and our Radio Flyer wagon in black crepe paper. In the wagon we lay Kathie's teddy bear, Mr. Boo, a character from her favorite story, who wore a morning coat and a green vest with black stripes. I, dressed by my sisters in one of my dad's black suit coats, his old hat pulled down over my head, pedaled through the parade as “Digger O'Dell and the late Mr. Boo,” winning an honorable mention and twenty-five cents.
Over the ensuing months, Kathie, two years older, took it upon herself to educate me on the topic of death. If I coughed or cleared a little phlegm from my throat, she would say, “You could die from that.” Any slight injury brought a similar remark - an ache, a pain, a cut, a scratch: “You could die from that, Linda.” Before too long I was running into my parents' bedroom every night in panic.
“I'm dying,” I cried to my mother.
“Oh, no, you're not. Go back to bed and turn on your light.”
At the dinner table my sister watched me as I cut my meat. She stared as I put it into my mouth and chewed.
“You could die from that,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“The pieces are too big. You'll choke.”
“Oh, Kathie, for heaven sakes!” my mother said. Warned, my sister ventured not another word, only raised one eyebrow and gave me a knowing look.
It was my understanding that no one could die on a Sunday. I'm not sure if I had arrived at that conclusion myself or if Kathie had enlightened me. But it made sense. Why would God let anyone die on a Sunday? It was the one day of the week I considered myself safe.
Six months after Mr. Mallow's death, the phone rang early on a dark December morning, a Sunday. My parents were still asleep. My grandfather was ill. By the time my sisters and mother and I were in church, my father was on a plane to California . And even though it was a Sunday, fear settled into my soul and I prayed, oh, how I prayed. I slid back into the pew, leaned against my mother, stared straight ahead at the Methodist hymnals, pledge cards and small pencils in the rack before me. “Please, God! Don't let Grandpa Baker die. Please, please, don't let him die - not on a Sunday.” I felt my silent words rise straight to heaven on the swells of the organ.
I hardly knew my grandfather. Even before he and my grandmother had followed my aunt and her family from Illinois out to California the year before, my grandfather was only an old man to me, who sat silent in an overstuffed, horsehair chair set against the window in the living room of his bungalow. I played on the far side of the room from him at the fringed edge of the carpet, careful not to let the dominoes fall onto the hardwood floor as I poured them from the dented, black lunch pail scratched with my grandfather's name. As the clock on the mantle chimed away the quarter hours, I ventured glances in my grandfather's direction. The sunlight streaming through the lace curtains consumed the pale features of his face.
Try as I might all day that Sunday, in church and on the way home, his features remained elusive to me, a face growing into bright white light then fading into a faint curtain wafting on a breeze. I remember being puzzled that no one mentioned my grandfather. It was as though it were just another Sunday. After church, Kathie spread out the Sunday comics in a patch of early afternoon sunlight on the living room floor and read, lying on her stomach, her chin cupped in her hand. Karen disappeared upstairs behind the closed door of her room at the dark end of the hall. The smell of the roast cooking in the oven for our midday dinner filled the house. In the kitchen my mother, wearing an apron over her Sunday clothes, stirred the gravy. I came to learn later that this was the way our family got through traumatic events. Carry on as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Even if your whole world was about to be turned upside down, carry on.
“Linda, if you've nothing to do, why don't you make yourself useful and set the table?” my mother suggested.
I was relieved when at last the day crept into evening, the hours my mother permitted us to watch TV. On Sundays we were even allowed to take our supper, sandwiches, chips and three olives, served on purple grape-shaped plates, up to the sewing room where we watched Wally Cox as Mr. Peepers on our small-screened Philco TV. I remember sucking the pimento out of an olive and Mr. Peepers standing before a row of lockers in the hallway of his school when my mother called from the second landing of our stairway, “Girls! Daddy called. Grandpa Baker just died.”
There was a pause. “Girls! Did you hear me?”
“We heard you!” Kathie shouted.
I looked to Kathie, but she didn't say another word, didn't even catch my eye, only stared straight ahead at the TV screen. My eyes filled with tears, though I wasn't quite sure why.
The train to California , the Santa Fe Chief, a long silver snake, waited diesel-silent for us at Union Station amidst the clang of bells, the hiss and steam and cinders of the black, local locomotives. We rode for three days and two nights, sleeping in our seats, changing into pajamas in the bathroom, my mother bracing her feet and elbows against the narrow walls, holding us up, helping us balance as the train rolled beneath our feet, warning, “Watch your clothes, Honey. Don't let anything touch the dirty floor.”
We crossed the Mississippi , a slim, black void in the twinkling lights of the night. There were gristly hamburgers in the dining car and watery Cokes up in the domed observation lounge where, surrounded by cloudless blue sky, my sisters taught me to play Solitaire.
The train stopped one night in Santa Fe. Holding my mother's hand, we stepped down from the train onto a platform where I saw my breath and stars and Indians wrapped in colorful blankets selling pottery and silver jewelry by the side of the train. Or was that a dream?
My uncle met us at the station in Los Angeles. Even after we disembarked our legs still rocked with the motion of the train.
My grandparents' house was one of many identical-looking small box houses lining a treeless street. Located at the top of a hill, its paint faded to a sun-washed green, the house looked nothing like what had been my grandparents' home - a white bungalow with a welcoming front porch in the shade of a tall elm. Only the sound of the clock in the living room chiming every quarter hour was familiar. And only my grandmother was there, smaller somehow, shriveled like a flower fallen from a vase.
My father took our luggage to our rooms. Kathie and I were to stay in the front bedroom; Karen and my grandmother, in the back. The house was too small for all of us, so my parents would stay with my aunt and uncle.
There were two beds in our room - one an old army cot, the other, a high, single bed with iron bedstead bars reminding me of a prison. Three firm pillows in white starched linen towered at the head of the bed.
Kathie lunged for the cot, “I got dibs on this bed.”
I only wondered a moment over her generosity, “Kathie! Hey!”
“I've got the cot.”
“But this is Grandpa's bed.”
“So?”
“What if Grandpa died in this bed?”
“Grandpa did die in that bed.”
All night long the starched linen scratched and the vision of the pale ghost of my grandfather propped against pillows prickled. Death's shadow on the wall held out a shroud waiting to enfold me if I fell asleep. There was no one to run to. Only the clock in the living room kept me company, chiming away the long quarter hours of the night. The first ray of dawn slipping beneath the window shade finally came to rescue me.
Now, almost fifty years later, I have, of course, become much more familiar with death. I know God grants no breathing space. Kathie was right. Death is always a possibility. When? Where? To whom? The only questions. It's only a matter of time, so I might as well look up and enjoy the sky for death will come riding whether I see it or not in the billowing, white shapes of the cumulus. |
