How He Tried to Communicate with Spirits
My Grandfather Oliver believed that living people can communicate with the spirits of people who are dead. He believed that he had witnessed this when he was a child and lived with his Uncle L.P. who was a spiritualist medium.
He said that his Uncle L.P. could do what was called a corner séance. His Uncle L.P. would sit in the corner of a room that had all its curtains pulled closed so that no outside light could get into it. An oil lamp would be placed on the floor in the middle of the room, though the light from it had to be kept low and shaded so that Uncle L.P. didn’t go blind or die.
Uncle L.P. would play a trumpet until his eyes rolled back inside his head. He would stop playing and start to shake. The voices of other people would start to come out of his mouth or the spirits would start to form out of the light from the oil lamp and speak through their own mouths.
The spirits and the voices would say how and when and where they died. They would answer any of these questions about any other dead people and they would take messages or questions back to the spirits of other dead people.
My grandfather said that when his Uncle L.P. would begin to get tired, the voices of the spirits would start to get quiet or their forms would start to dissolve into a weak fog that seemed to slip away down into the floorboards. Uncle L.P. would collapse down into his chair in the corner of the room and his eyes would roll back out of his head. Somebody would put the oil lamp out and Uncle L.P. would stand up. They would open the curtains back up and somebody would bring a glass of buttermilk and a plate of warm biscuits with honey on them into the room so that Uncle L.P. could eat and drink to get his strength and his voice back.
It doesn’t matter to me if this were truth or fiction. It only matters to me that it seemed true to my grandfather. He believed it and it was a comfort to him. It helped him to make sense of the death of his mother and of his father, the death of his daughter, and then the death of his wife. He believed that he could talk to all of them after they had died.
This is part of the reason that my grandfather learned how to communicate with the dead too. He would write questions down on little slips of paper and the spirits would answer him in the form of knocks on the walls or on the wood furniture. One knock meant no. Two knocks meant they didn’t know. Three knocks meant yes.
My grandfather told my grandmother about the code of knocks and asked her to come back to him to talk to him if she died before he did. My grandfather said that there was a lot of knocking on their bedroom furniture after my grandmother died, but that he never could understand all of it. He believed that the knocking was her, that her presence was meant to be reassuring, and that she was telling him that there was another world after the one that he was living in then.
But the house that my grandmother and grandfather lived in was old too. It made lots of sounds at night — the foundation settling down, the wind in the chimney, maybe footsteps on the floorboards, maybe a knocking sound in the walls.
How I Hear Voices
I tried to communicate with my Grandfather Oliver after he died. I wrote questions down on little slips of paper and kept them in my pockets waiting for answers for them. Sometimes, I still find the little slips of paper in the pockets of jackets that I haven’t worn since it was last cold.
I lay awake at night and thought of questions to ask my grandfather. I listened for the knocks on the bedroom furniture or for the footsteps on the old wood floors of the house that I live in with my wife, but I never heard anything that might be an answer from him. Still, sometimes I think that what I may be doing is channeling voices. I hear people who aren’t here saying things to me and I write them down.
PART SEVEN
How I Couldn’t Take Any of My Funeral Clothes Off
I went back inside through the back door and walked back to what used to be our bedroom. I was going to take my funeral clothes off, but it felt too difficult to untie my tie or my shoes. It felt too difficult to unbutton my shirt or my pants. I couldn’t take my suit jacket off. It fit a little tight around my shoulders and it felt as if my wife had her arms around me.
My funeral clothes were all that were holding me together then. I was afraid that I would start to forget my wife if I took any of them off. But I didn’t know what else to do after her funeral was over and my wife was buried inside a casket under the ground and I was back inside our house. I kept waiting for her to come back home to me or back to life.
I walked back down the hallway, into the living room, and sat down in a chair. I got up out of the chair and then I sat back down in it. I looked out the window, out into the backyard, and then looked back inside myself.
I didn’t want to look inside me or be inside myself anymore, but I kept thinking of things that I wanted to tell her — that I liked the dress that she was wearing, that I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, that I was going to bring her some flowers and her hairbrush and a change of her clothes when I came to see her soon.
I kept thinking of her grave and her inside her casket and all the dirt on top of her and between us. I wanted to dig her casket up and stand it up and open it up. I wanted her to be standing up and for her to step out of her casket and step back into our living room with me.
I always liked the way that she stood in a doorway and the way that she walked into any room. I always liked the way that she chewed her food and the way that she drank from a glass and I wondered if she could feel hungry or thirsty.
I didn’t think that there could be any insects inside her casket yet and I wondered if she itched and I thought of the way that her nose wrinkled up when she didn’t like something. I wondered if the insects would mess her hair up or get under her clothes and bite her skin like they always did.
I always liked the way that she took her clothes off and put her clothes on. I always liked the way that she said my name and touched my hair. I kept waiting for her to come back home and touch my hair and say my name.
How I Danced with the Floor Lamp
I pulled one of my wife’s dresses off a hanger in her closet and pulled it down over the length of a floor lamp. I pulled a hat of hers down over the lampshade. I glued a pair of her shoes down onto the base of the floor lamp and waited for the glue to dry. I plugged the floor lamp into an outlet in the living room, turned the floor lamp on, and her head lit up.
The dress was full length and it had long sleeves. I held onto the cuff one long sleeve of her dress with my palm and fingers and tucked the cuff of the other long sleeve into my waistband at the small of my back. I placed my other hand behind the long stand of the floor lamp just above where the base of her spine would have been if the floor lamp were my wife.
I waited for the music to start playing inside my head. I pulled the floor lamp up against my body and felt the heat from the light on my face. I tipped the floor lamp back with my one arm and leaned over with her. I stood back up and spun the floor lamp away from me along the edge of its round base and along the length of my arm and the long sleeve of her dress. The base of the floor lamp made a scraping noise against the hardwood floor and so did my shoes.
I could see myself dancing with her on the living room walls. I could see the shadows of us dancing on the walls all the way around the living room.