The Shades of Abercrombie

In roughly 40 years my house will be 200 years old. It's something to think about. Many of its timbers date back to just before the Civil War. There are strange cracks and bulges in some of the walls. The house owns two ghosts. They are Mrs. Abercrombie and her daughter Emily. Mrs. Abercrombie still thinks she owns the house, but mostly she sits quietly in a chair I placed for her in the front parlor. She sits and knits, sits and knits ghost yarn endlessly. She becomes agitated when Mormon missionaries knock on the front door, and I have heard her call out, "Harold! The pistol!" on one such occasion. The missionaries blanched and beat a quick retreat to the center of town. Randallooney spoke through the radio last night and he made Brahms sound like the Devil's march in the darkness. I felt afraid. I didn't get to sleep until after 6 a.m. when I was supposed to be up with the farmers slopping hogs. You can have this job they say hallucinating big black spiders swinging down from the branches of the elm tree. I don't know if I'll go into town today, everyone seems upset, and I bet there is an emergency meeting in the back room of the hardware store. Mrs. Abercrombie does not speak to me directly, but she is unhappy if I sit in her chair or move it very far one way or another. When that happens, she storms up the stairs and paces in the hallway outside the bathroom. My Siamese cat talks to her with gargly meows he saves just for talking to Mrs. Abercrombie when she is restless.