Ghost Wood Song Read online

  Dedication

  For my sister, Melinda

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Books by Erica Waters

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  I’m as restless as the ghosts today. The sigh of the trees makes my scalp prickle, my senses strain. There’s something waiting for me in the silences between the notes we play, like a vibration too low for human ears. It’s been out here in the woods for weeks, just out of my reach.

  No one else notices. Sarah leans over her banjo, dark hair falling across her forehead, mouth set in concentration. The music that spins from her fingertips is bright as the sunshine that drifts across the pine needles. She looks soft in this light, her eyelashes downy as moth wings.

  The wood behind her glows golden right up to the edge of Mama’s property, where the true forest begins. There, the sunlight loses its hold, fading to shadows. Those trees grow tall and close together, clotted with brambles and vines. That’s where the ghosts who spill out of Aunt Ena’s house like to linger, mingling their whispers with the wind. I can’t quite catch their words, but they tug at me, drawing my attention away from the music.

  “Jesus, Shady,” Sarah says, her voice hacking through the song like a machete. Orlando slaps his hand over his guitar strings to mute the chord he fumbled. “You missed your cue again. Why didn’t you come in?” All her moth-wing softness has disappeared.

  “Sorry,” I say, glancing at the fiddle in my lap. “There’s not much for me to do in this song.” I pull a loose thread from the fraying hem of my skirt, wrapping it around my finger.

  That was the second time I forgot to come in. I’m distracted today, but the truth is, this song doesn’t mean anything to me. I want to learn to play bluegrass the way my daddy did—like it’s the breath in my lungs, the beat of my heart. And I never will if Sarah keeps picking all these folk-rock songs.

  She pushes her short, messy hair back with an impatient hand, revealing her undercut and the cloud-shaped birthmark behind her ear. I’ve thought so many times about running my lips over just that spot. “The open mic’s in one week, Shady. We can play something else, but if we don’t decide on a song today, we won’t be ready in time.” There’s an edge to her voice like she’s been paired with a lazy classmate for a group project. “You know how badly I need to win this.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again, louder, taking up my fiddle to show I’m paying attention. I know I’m the one at fault, but the annoyance in her voice makes me glare back at her, all thoughts of lips on skin forgotten. “I want to win, too, you know.”

  The prize is a free half day in a small recording studio, a chance to record a song with professional help and equipment. It sounds cool, but I mostly want to win to make Sarah happy. She thinks it would help her get into a good music school.

  But we can’t even agree on what song we’re going to play for the open mic night. Sarah only wants to play newer, more popular folk-rock, Orlando flits from one style of music to another like a butterfly tasting flowers, and I can only really perform if we’re playing traditional folk and bluegrass. We’re like the leftovers from three different dishes someone’s trying to make into a casserole.

  “We could do ‘Wagon Wheel’ instead. It has a strong fiddle part,” Sarah says.

  “‘Wagon Wheel’?” I say, so surprised I flinch. The last time we played “Wagon Wheel” it was just Sarah and me, alone in her room. One minute we were playing and the next our lips were inches apart. Sarah pulled away before we could kiss, but it changed everything between us. We haven’t talked about it since. Maybe now she’s trying to remind me, to give me an opening?

  Confusion passes over her face, followed quickly by a deep blush. She definitely didn’t mean to bring up the almost-kiss.

  “‘Wagon Wheel’ is kind of overplayed,” I say, glancing away.

  “It’s a crowd pleaser, though,” Orlando offers, oblivious to what just happened. He’s stretched out on his belly, wire-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose, which hovers about three inches from a mess of pill bugs he found under a rock. That’s always the danger of holding practice in the woods—Orlando will wander off after a grasshopper or get stuck watching the progress of an ant colony for hours on end. His whole absentminded-professor thing irritates Sarah, but you can’t blame a person for loving what they love. And Orlando loves bugs.

  “Any other ideas?” Sarah asks.

  “I’ve been working on ‘The Twa Sisters.’ Orlando likes that one too.”

  “It’s too creepy and weird,” she says, shaking her head.

  I shrug. She’s not wrong. “The Twa Sisters” is an old folk song about two sisters who fall in love with the same boy, so one drowns the other. When the drowned sister’s body washes up on the riverbank, a young fiddler finds it and shapes her bones into fiddle parts. Her rib cage becomes a fiddle, her finger bones its pegs. But the bone-made fiddle will only play one tune: Oh, the dreadful wind and rain.

  Daddy taught me “The Twa Sisters” during one of his low times, when his songs all turned dark and drear, as far from the bright notes of bluegrass as a person can get with a fiddle in hand. You’d think he was the one who killed the fair sister from the song, the way his voice got so husky-sad, the way his fiddle cried.

  Only tune that the fiddle would play was

  Oh, the dreadful wind and rain

  I’ve been practicing it for weeks, but I still can’t play it like he did, as if the song’s story is my own. My notes come out sweet and bright, no matter how I try to deepen and darken them. But I can’t seem to leave this song alone, like it’s the only one my fiddle wants to play.

  I’d never say it out loud, and even admitting it to myself gives me chills, but if I could have a fiddle made of my daddy’s bones, I’d take it. I’d take it and play it and learn all the secrets he kept, all the sorrows he bore inside his breast. I think that’s what made his music so good.

  “I don’t get why you’re so opposed to playing new music,” Sarah says as if she’s reading my thoughts.

  “And I don’t get why you’re so opposed to playing good music,” I shoot back, heat spreading across my cheeks.

  Sarah’s lips part for a retort, but then she closes her mouth, looks down at her lap. She puts on such a tough front, but underneath all that sarcasm and bossiness there’s this tender, easily bruised Sarah she tries so hard to hide. And my barb cut right through.

  Before I can apologize, she snatches up her banjo and stalks off through the woods, her boots kicking up pine needles. Orlando groans and gets up to follow her, leaving me with only the trees for company. I wish I could make her understand what playing the fiddle means to me—what it used to mean, what it can’t ever mean again.

  I know that music could be my ticket out of here, out of Mama’s crowded t
railer, out of Goodwill clothes and food that comes in cans and boxes. It could be an escape from all the memories that never leave me be. But that’s not why I play the fiddle. My family history—everything we’ve lost, all our ghosts and all our griefs—those feel like the truest part of me, the beating heart of my music. Playing Sarah’s way is like taking an ax to my deepest, most secret roots.

  Bright, soft banjo notes begin to drift through the trees. Sarah’s playing a Gillian Welch song, the one about Elvis. Orlando starts singing along, his voice rich and sweet as molasses.

  Their music floods me with longing, making me think of ninth grade, when the three of us met. Sarah had just transferred from another county, and Orlando had moved to Briar Springs from Miami the summer before. We were close friends within a few weeks and started playing music together soon after. Orlando was happy to discover that the bluegrass Sarah and I liked reminded him a little of the guajira music—Cuban country—he’d grown up playing with his grandfather and uncles. He taught us a few Cuban songs, and we taught him bluegrass and folk. Music is what made us friends, but now it feels like it’s pulling us apart. If we could play together again like we used to, when it was just for fun, when we laughed through half the songs we played—

  I grab my fiddle and follow their notes like bread crumbs through the trees.

  They both look up, startled, when I reach the small clearing where they sit. “That’s the one,” I say, pushing down all my doubts. “We’ll play that for the open mic night.”

  I linger in the woods after Sarah and Orlando head home. The sun has gone down, and the woods are hushed, shadows spilling like ink through the trees. The air is cool and sweet with the smells of early spring.

  I raise my fiddle and breathe into the quiet, my eyes closed in concentration. A great horned owl hoots gently somewhere nearby, like a chiding mother telling me to get on with it.

  Daddy always said twilight was good for ghost raising because it’s an in-between time, when the barrier between worlds seems to grow thin as tissue paper and the ghosts are at their lonesomest. This fiddle can’t so much as poke a hole in that tissue paper, but it’s the only one I’ve got now.

  Daddy’s fiddle drew ghosts like hummingbirds to nectar. Mine only reminds me of everything I’m not, everything I’ll never be.

  My bow slices across the strings, sending a wail into the blue hush and startling the owl, who erupts in a flurry of shocked feathers from a branch high above my head, hooting her displeasure.

  I play “The Twa Sisters” over and over again, trying to imagine myself as the drowned sister, watching the world turn to brown river water. Then I play it as the fiddler who finds the body and strings the girl’s long, yellow hair into a fiddle bow. But the song comes out the same—sad and sweet, quiet and calm as the river that washed up her bones.

  Finally, I let the song fade, its last notes disappearing into the skinny pines. Night settles in around me, the air close and clammy. Cicadas take up where my fiddle left off, and small animals rustle in the brush. The trees sigh and sigh and sigh. This forest feels like an ear that’s always listening but never hears what it’s hoping to. Maybe it misses Daddy’s fiddle same as I do. Maybe it’s waiting, like I am too, for a voice of its own.

  I turn to put my fiddle in its case, when, like a belated echo, a snatch of music comes back to me from the trees, deep and pure and full of grief, the dark twin of my bow’s last arc. A shiver runs up my spine, spreading chill bumps over my arms. Every muscle in my body tenses, waiting for another note.

  “Shady,” Mama yells from the trailer, making me jump. “It’s dinnertime.” The door slams, and I shake myself.

  I put my fiddle in its case and turn for home, back through the hungry, darkening woods, back toward Mama’s trailer, to the life we made inside the emptiness Daddy’s death left behind.

  Two

  Our trailer always puts me in mind of a tin can with a firecracker that’s about to blow. Tonight’s no different. My stepdad, Jim, is laid out on the recliner with NASCAR cranked up loud enough to make you think you’re on the track yourself, inhaling burned-rubber fumes. Mama’s at the stove banging pots and pans and swearing under her breath, while my two-year-old sister, Honey, tugs at Mama’s Waffle House uniform. The smells of fried chicken, instant mashed potatoes, and canned spinach make my stomach turn.

  “Shady, where’ve you been?” Mama asks when she catches sight of me standing at the counter that divides the kitchen from the living room.

  “I was in the woods with Sarah and Orlando.” Honey wanders over, and I start to braid a section of her silky hair. My own hair’s so curly and thick you can’t run your fingers through it, so I love playing with Honey’s.

  “They left an hour ago. You been out there by yourself playing that fiddle?” Mama wipes sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

  I don’t answer, so she goes on muttering. “Just like your daddy, too busy playing that instrument to help me.”

  Mama’s in a temper, but I know it’s not really about me. It never is. “I’ll help you, Mama. What do you need?” I say, touching her arm.

  Her eyes soften. “Go tell Jesse to come in here for dinner.”

  I cross back through the living room, but Jim doesn’t even see me, his eyes locked on the endlessly circling cars. His cell phone is ringing, but he ignores it.

  I knock at Jesse’s door and then poke my head in. “Mama says come to dinner.”

  My older brother sits on his bed, back against the headboard, with earbuds in, steadily texting. An awful, metallic-sounding music grates from the speakers.

  “Jesse.”

  “What?” he says, yanking one earbud out. He pushes a shock of light-brown hair from his eyes.

  “Are you coming to dinner, or not? Mama’s in a bad mood, though, so you’d better get in there.”

  Jesse sighs like I’ve come to lead him to his death.

  “What’d you do now?” I ask.

  “Why’s it gotta be something I did?”

  “It’s always you. Can’t you find something better to do with your time? You could play with my band and me. It doesn’t have to be fiddle—you could learn mandolin or something. Daddy would be so disappointed that you—”

  Jesse’s face goes hard before I can even finish the sentence. “Fuck off.”

  I step back and look away, my cheeks flushing with anger and embarrassment. I turn to leave, but Jesse’s voice stops me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  I spin back to face him. “You did, though.” Sometimes I look at Jesse and don’t even recognize him anymore, but he’s still my brother, and I miss him. I miss the way we used to be, before he saw Daddy die right in front of him, before Mama moved another man into Daddy’s place.

  “Yeah, I did, but I’m still sorry. I just don’t want to play music like that, okay?” Jesse’s voice softens. “Playing that sad song over and over again isn’t going to make him come back, you know. You’re only making it harder on yourself.”

  His words sink like fishing weights in my stomach, landing cold and true. Is that what I’m hoping for, deep down, when I spend hours in the woods, playing for the unreachable ghosts? Is that why I can’t stop playing “The Twa Sisters”? These past few weeks it’s all I’ve wanted to do.

  I shrug and change the subject. “Will you at least come see me play at the open mic next weekend?”

  “Maybe,” he says, pushing me forward. “Now get out.”

  When we trudge into the kitchen, Mama’s eyes snag on Jesse, but she doesn’t say anything. Jim’s glowering at the screen of his phone, which has started ringing again.

  I go to the stove and make a big plate of food for Honey and me to share. That way, Mama won’t notice if I don’t eat any meat. She’s dead set against me becoming a vegetarian. Honey’s already at the table in her booster chair, and I squeeze past her to the seat between the microwave and window, well out of the fray.

  “Jim, turn off that noise and come eat w
ith us,” Mama says. “And answer your phone or turn it off.”

  “Goddamned Frank hassling me about that missing lumber delivery.” Jim silences the phone, but keeps scowling at it. “Just bring me a plate in here, Shirley.”

  “Do I look like your servant?” Mama asks, staring him down.

  Writers are always going on about piercing blue eyes, but they must’ve never seen Mama’s brown ones when she’s mad. She’ll burn a hole through sheet metal.

  Jim grunts and turns down the volume on the TV. He plunks himself into the chair next to Jesse, forcing his lanky legs under the table. “Why’s your mama in such a bad mood, boy?”

  Jesse doesn’t say anything. He stares down at his plate, running his fingers over the condensation on his glass of sweet tea.

  “The principal called,” Mama says, answering for Jesse. “He skipped school all week.” She turns to Jesse and levels that metal-burning stare on him. “You trying to get me jailed for truancy?”

  “Maybe it’s time we pulled him out of school,” Jim says, rubbing the back of his permanently sunburned neck. “Let him make his own living. Might teach him a thing or two. He was never going to college nohow, so what’s he need to finish high school for?”

  “My son is going to finish high school,” Mama says, her voice dangerous.

  Mama dropped out of high school as a teenager and only went to get her GED after Jesse was born. You mention dropping out of school—even as a joke—and you’re in for a three-day lecture about how shameful it feels to go out in the world without an education. Jim ought to know better.

  Our stepdad usually keeps his thoughts to himself, at least when Mama’s around, but he’s like a dog with a bone tonight. Maybe because his boss, his brother Frank, has been riding him harder than usual at the construction company. But more and more, that’s just how it is between Jim and Jesse. Each one is an itch the other can’t stop scratching, and tonight Jesse’s a full-blown rash.

  “You keep letting him run around, wasting his life, it don’t matter if he finishes high school,” Jim says. “He’ll be in prison anyway. That’s about all he’s good for.”