Ghost Country: A Novel

Ghost Country

A Novel

By Dana Michelle Burnett

Copyright 2010 Dana Michelle Burnett Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to others. If you would like to share this book with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for them. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, to real people, living or dead; or to real locations are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictiously, and their resemblance, if any, to person or place is entirely coincidental.

Earlier versions of this book appeared in Foliate Oak and Mobius.

This book is dedicated to my father for sharing his stories.

The Ghost Country

(Rose—2010)

My aunts have asked me to accompany them to my grandmother’s house. They want my help to sort through her things now that she has gone on to Tsusgina’i, the ghost country. It is the final duty of a daughter and I was to represent my mother, who was too busy with her artsy friends to deal with the obligation.

My mother commonly had this reaction to death. If we were in nearby Corydon, she would cross the street rather than walk past the front of the funeral parlor. I didn’t pretend to understand this, since it was my aunt Autumn that lost a husband, but then again, my mother had mourned a dead rock star for most of her life. Needless to say, she had some strange ideas about death.

When my Aunt Ama called with the news of my grandmother’s death, my mother came down with a full schedule and volunteered me to act in her place. When Ama told me, I wasn’t surprised by my mother’s reaction, but I was shocked that my grandmother died. I always thought that the devil himself would have to hit my grandmother over the head himself to get her in the ground.

How did she die? I asked.

What do you mean ‘how did she die’? Aunt Ama barked. She was seventy-six years old. She just woke up dead, that’s all.

I did not ask how a person could wake up if she was dead. I understood what she meant, that my grandmother was old, had lived her life, and now she was dead. It was as simple as that, but in our family, it was never that simple.

My grandmother started and honored the traditions in our family. Some of these were handed down from her Cherokee parents, others I was pretty sure she made up as she went along. For example: The name thing, what was that about? All of the names in our family were special, be it the seasons in which we were born (my mother and her sisters claimed that right), the Cherokee name for the month that we were born in such as my cousin Anayilisv, something in nature such as I, or to honor the dead as in my cousin Joe’s case.

My grandmother told us the story of her own name Selu, which meant corn in the Cherokee language. It was something about a woman that could make corn come out of her body and her sons that buried her body wrong when she died; I never really paid close enough attention because I could not ever get the facts straight.

Let that be a lesson to you, she would say to my cousins and me. Always listen to your mothers.

I do not know about my cousins, but I never took that lesson from her story. What I remembered was the corn coming from the woman’s body, but even that trivial fact somehow got mixed up in my six-year-old mind. I would go into her kitchen in the early summer and see fresh cornhusks in the garbage can. My imagination took flight and I would be pulling at my mother’s hand and announcing that my grandmother had pooped in the garbage can again.

Everyone would laugh when I said this, thinking it was my childish attempt at a joke. I never could understand why they were laughing, no one bothered to explain. It seemed that I never understood anything, that even now I was still seeing the world through the eyes of a six-year-old child. Now, after learning of my grandmother’s death, I was trying to remember the story about the corn woman and just what it was that the sons did wrong when they buried her so that we would not make the same mistake.

* * *

My grandmother’s house was just outside of Lanesville, Indiana. It was a small white bungalow surrounded by three acres that had not been tended in more than thirty years and kept the house lost in a sea of green grass. When I arrived, the first person that I saw was my Aunt Ama. I was starting to think that you had forgotten us. She complained. What took you so long?

Aunt Autumn stood up, I had not seen her sitting on the porch swing, and nodded as she shook her finger at me. We were starting to worry.

I did not say anything. What could I say? Do I tell them the truth? Do I tell them that I sat in my apartment and tried to think of a plausible excuse not to come? My mother would have told them just that, but I was not my mother.

Aunt Ama unlocked the door and motioned us inside, waving her hand as if trying to fan the outside air into the old house. Once inside, I understood. The house held the scent of the food cooked over the years such as greasy venison and sweet grape dumplings, of Christmases long gone when the rooms were decorated with pine boughs and sweet pears, talc from my grandmother’s twice-daily showers, and of ammonia where she mopped the kitchen floor twice each and every day. A lifetime of scents trapped in rooms too small to hold them.

I looked around the living room, expecting things to be different, but nothing changed from my last visit. Along the walls was the same old furniture, nubby and black, looking just as ragged as it must have been long ago when my grandfather brought it home from a yard sale. My mother used to shake her head at this every time that we entered the house and would declare loudly: Your grandmother never owned anything new in her life until my father left, don’t let that happen to you.

Being only a child, I dared to ask her once what was so wrong with that furniture. She snorted, Every time I sit down, I think of some stranger farting on that same cushion.

That thought stuck with me over the years. Each time that we visited my grandmother, I would look at that couch and picture an overweight man in his boxer shorts passing gas while drinking a beer. It got to where I could almost smell it.

Back when she first corrupted me with this idea, we lived with my grandmother, later we visited her every Sunday. The aunts would be there with my cousins and we would all have lunch together as a family.

My mother and her sisters would stay in the kitchen with my grandmother. My cousins and I would pretend to go off and play, but then we would sneak back to listen at the door. We heard stories of things that took place before we were born, people we never met, and things never meant for our ears. I think we all learned about sex by listening to our mothers’ giggling conversations through that kitchen door.

Your mom is so cool, my cousin Ana whispered after overhearing my mother talk about her escapades at a place called Woodstock. I wish my mom was more like her.

Ana’s mother was my Aunt Ama and I used to think that Ama was the most beautiful, even more so than my own mother was, because Aunt Ama kept her black hair in two long braids and always dressed in rich shades of turquoise. She was by far the most Cherokee of all of us and proud of it even though my mother often teased her and called her Pocahontas behind her back.

Your aunt wouldn’t know a good time if it hit her in the ass with a tomahawk, my mother would whisper, often loud enough for Ama to hear. What Pocahontas needs is a big chief in her teepee.

If Ama was the most beautiful, Aunt Autumn was the most tragic. No matter what she wore, she gave everyone the impression that she was in a perpetual state of mourning. Her life was like the script to an old movie, something sad and in black and white. She married her childhood sweetheart and when he died in Vietnam, she never got over it. She had to raise my cousin Joe all alone. It was the saddest thing that had ever happened in our family.

She’s going to die of a broken heart, my grandmother used to say about Aunt Autumn. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

Then there was my mother. She was not the most beautiful, in her face were too sharply blended the angular traits of her Cherokee mother and the fluid features of her German American father. She was full of contradictions, my mother was, and seemed to change her convictions as often as she changed her clothes. She could be the most annoying person in the world, preaching about animal cruelty, but when you asked her about her new leather purse she would smile and say that it was from the Big Mac that she ate for lunch. She took up all of the space in a room with the enormity of her personality; you couldn’t be near her without feeling pushed out of the way.

I followed my aunts to the back of the house and into the kitchen. I was stunned to see them opening cabinets and taking down cans of soup and boxes of crackers. What are you doing?

First we will have lunch, Aunt Ama explained. Then we will take care of things.

Now the idea of cooking and eating in a dead woman’s kitchen did not appeal to me at all, regardless of the fact that the dead woman was my grandmother that I had seen almost every day of my life. Why don’t we just go out to eat then?

And waste all of this food? Aunt Autumn chimed in while pouring the soup into a pan. Don’t be ridiculous.

If there was any one principle that all of us inherited from our ancestors, it was the idea of never taking more of anything that we could use, waste was the unforgivable sin. Long conversations would take place regarding what to do with a scrap of fabric or the remnant of carpet left over when Aunt Autumn had her bedroom carpet replaced. I still remember the guilty pleasure I experienced the first night in my own apartment when I threw an empty jar of mayonnaise away. The family motto, if there was one, had to be Waste not, want not. My mother even adhered to this strange idea, although she did warp it from time to time to suit her mood.

Because of this ideal, our feast that day was a potluck of items from the cabinets that would soon go stale and products from the refrigerator that were nearing the expiration date. Eating in our family was not a formal affair, or even a gracious one. By the meal’s end, Aunt Ama was eating chocolate chip ice cream straight from the carton with one of my grandmother’s serving spoons.

Rose, make us all some coffee. She ordered with a wave of her spoon, We will have some while we work.

I did as I was told. Even though I was there in my mother’s place and she was the middle child, I was still the youngest in the kitchen that day and