Ghosts and a Murder

There were so many cousins. The Taylors were a sprawling clan, the family tree heavy with fruit. When Montgomery was a boy he was closest to Uncle Johnnie’s kids, particularly Anna, the youngest. They were about the same age and possessed the same propensity for mischief. As he sat at the desk in his library surrounded by his mother’s correspondence, he noticed a letter she had written to Anna in 1969 but never sent. It was so typical of Elizabeth Taylor to write such  letters. Whenever she had a thought she would write it down with the greatest of intentions of sharing, but somehow her busy life would conspire against follow through. This note was so kind and loving it brought a lump to his throat as he read. His mother was trying to encourage her niece who was worried sick about her brother Richie. Even though Anna was only ten, she watched Walter Cronkite on their grainy black and white RCA Victor every night like everyone else. She heard the dour old man give the day’s kill numbers from Vietnam and her young heart would break with worry. Anna, every night I lift Richie up in my prayers. Each night I beg the Lord for protection for your brother. And each night God answers my prayers.

Montgomery smiled. It was so like his mother, basking in her unique personal connection with the creator of the universe. Of all the millions of prayers raised each night by the dutiful and the desperate, Elizabeth Taylor’s prayers were heard and answered. It was an otherworldly relationship that defied not only logic but theological scrutiny. Nevertheless, she persisted with undimmed confidence.

As Montgomery sifted through the letters and random scraps of paper he found a faded photograph of Richie and Anna taken in 1968. There was Richie in his sharp Army Ranger uniform with it’s distinctive beret, his arm around his little sister’s shoulder. Probably a going away party from the looks of it. Anna had been crying.

He remembered a story at that moment that he hadn’t thought about in years. It had been told to him years ago by Patty, Anna’s older sister. For some unknown reason, Richie and Anna were having a sleepover in the horrid back room at Blue Hill, the sinister red sofa frowning at them through the darkness. Richie heard his grandmother’s shuffling footsteps coming from the kitchen down the dark hallway to their room. “Kids? Wake up now. Put on your shoes and follow me.”

Edna led them both to the kitchen then to the back door. “Somebody is in the pasture. See?”

Anna squinted through the window and saw a pair of lanterns swaying with the rhythm of people walking. They were half way down the hill from the cemetery on this cloudy, moonless night. 

“Who are they?” Anna asked

“I don’t know, child.” Edna answered. “But they’ve been walking back and forth out there for the last thirty minutes so they are probably lost. I want you kids to go out there and unlock the gate for them. Whoever they are, they’re going to catch their death out there.”

When Montgomery first heard the story he remembered thinking, as he did now, what an odd strategy. Two strangers trespassing on your property in the middle of the night and instead of carrying a shotgun, she sends her two defenseless grandchildren out to greet them armed only with a lantern and each other. But, such was the less jaded existence of farm life in 1960’s America.

Anna, terrified, stayed glued to her brother’s side as they walked down the back steps, through the yard and past the barn where their grandfather kept his Packard. By the time they reached the big swinging gate at the entrance to the pasture, they noticed that the lanterns had stopped swaying. Richie hollered out, “You guys lost? Nanny says you should come inside and warm up or you’re gonna catch your death!”

Anna never wavered on what happened next. Every time she told the story, she added details, changed others, but this was the one stalwart and reliable fact...the lanterns vanished.

“Hogwash!” Montgomery had exclaimed the first time hearing the tail. “More like the men blew their lanterns out and ran away!”

Anna was adamant. “NO, Cousin. By this time our eyes had adjusted to the darkness. We both could see outlines of their bodies and their floppy hats. When those lanterns went out, their shadows left with them. Besides, if they had run away we would have heard those lanterns rattling. I’m telling you, the both of them vanished into thin air.”

Eventually Montgomery had stopped arguing the point, letting his cousin believe whatever she wanted to believe. Later, older and wiser Richie confirmed Anna’s version of the story, adding much needed gravitas to the tale. Many theories had sprung up over the years since seeking to guess the identity of the two lantern carriers. The most popular suggested that since Edna had seen them walking down from the graveyard, it was probably the ghost of Maggie Watson, the daughter of freed slaves who had worked at Blue Hill as a housekeeper for their Great Grandfather when he owned the place. Eventually Maggie and her husband had purchased a small plot of land just west of the graveyard and lived there until they both passed away. The small cabin they had built had been torn down years ago. It must have been the two of them searching for their old home, the only building either of them had ever owned.

                                                                                                                  ###

Uriah Madison Taylor was the one and only lawyer in a family of farmers and builders. He had attended the University of Virginia and gotten a law degree while his brothers and sisters stayed put at Blue Hill. He was a giant of a man, physically imposing yet gregarious. He practiced law at his office in Charlottesville during the week then came home to his farm adjacent to Blue Hill which he ran along with his sister. Elizabeth remembered how her Uncle would always bring her gifts from Charlottesville, which to her might has well have been from the ancient marketplace in Algiers. Uncle Uriah was the Taylor family exotic, the farm boy who made good in the big city.

Uncle Uriah also had a soft spot for bad men. His work put a lot of them in jail, but he believed in second chances and redemption. As a result he worked to establish a work release program for first offenders, a first for Charlottesville. From time to time his soft-hearted disposition led him to hire these work released men to work on his sister’s farm. He ignored the warnings of his legal colleagues, refusing to give in to their world weary conclusion that some human beings were beyond redemption and that his kindness and compassion was at best misplaced and at worst, dangerous.

One particularly cold December Friday evening when Uriah got back to the farm, his sister complained about one of his “convicts” being excessively lazy, repeatedly refusing to do what she asked him to do. Uriah called him into the main house to talk with him and hopefully appeal to the better angels of his character that Uriah insisted lived somewhere within every man. An argument ensued. The man stormed out of the house and headed back to the small barracks housing building that Uriah had built for the workers. Uriah, against his sister’s warnings, insisted in pursuing him. When he walked through the front door of the barracks the man shot him in the chest with a double barrel shotgun. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Uriah Taylor’s death caused a sensation throughout the polite society of Charlottesville. Montgomery’s father had attended the trial and told of the heightened emotional rhetoric and the fierce, unrepentant heart of the killer. Although Uriah’s belief in redemption had ultimately cost him his life, people who knew him believed that if he had it to do all over again...he would have. It was not the first tragic death to occur on the farm at Blue Hill, and it was not to be the last. But Uriah’s murder was to be a reminder to the Taylor family that the world could be an unforgiving place.

Sunday Sermon

Today is Sunday. Perhaps its time for a sermon about the dangers of allowing resentment to take root in your heart. To illustrate this eternal truth I could list at least a thousand scripture references from The Bible. But, I could also consult Gary Larson’s Far Side for all of you visual learners...

Amen.

Ounce of Prevention, Pound of Cure

I can’t tell you the number of times over the past six months when I heard people say some version of...You just wait, as soon as the election is over, you won’t hear a peep about COVID. People who say things like this are the kind of people for whom every complicated societal problem is a conspiracy foisted on the country by a confederacy of shadows. The thinking behind this claim was the notion that the only reason that COVID was being reported on in the press was because the press thought it a perfect cudgel with which to beat Donald Trump. As soon as Joe Biden won, reporting on a glorified flu would no longer serve any political purpose therefore, it would immediately disappear from the national conversation...

COVID FRIDAY THE 13TH: RECORD TESTS, RECORD CASES, RECORD HOSPITALIZATIONS... 

Can Biden convince red states to wear masks? 

Aide sees localized restrictions, not national lockdown... 

Before inauguration, 70,000 more could die... 

NM, OR reimpose stay-at-home orders... 

LA urges travel quarantine... 

Long Lines Growing At Testing Sites... 

Schools suspend in-person classes... 

Musk Says Both Positive AND Negative...

So, in 2020 even conspiracy theories can have off days.

I live in Virginia and we have been relatively fortunate where COVID is concerned. While my views of our governor remain that he is a colossal ass, generally speaking, his handling of this crisis has been B+ A-. Our numbers compared to most other states are great. And yesterday he reimposed restrictions on some gatherings etc.. Fine. COVID is real, it’s killing people, and it’s spreading. But, forget all of that for a moment. Set aside the potential for death that comes with a global pandemic. What I want to know is...how does all of this effect ME?? In 2020 thats all that matters, right?

For starters, COVID has cancelled my Thanksgiving. It’s complicated, but there will be no big feast at my house this year. Patrick and Sarah understandably aren’t comfortable driving nine hours to spend an afternoon crammed into a house with 18 people they haven’t seen in a year. Fortunately, Kaitlin and Jon just bought a house down in Columbia, South Carolina. The moving truck will show up at their place on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Pam and I will be there for most of the week helping them pack up and moving them into their beautiful new home. There will be lots of masks, lots of social distancing, and no Thanksgiving dinner. 

Last night we FaceTimed with our Nashville kids about Christmas Plans. That will be another fiasco, it appears. All of us desperately want to be together for Christmas. But when your family is separated by long distances during pandemics, it’s not easy. We are in the process of figuring it out. I am confident that we will somehow, someway work it out. It will most likely only be the six of us, an odd experience for someone like me from so large and gregarious a family. As a father, I’m not sure I have ever wanted to see my kids more than I do now. It has been hard during 2020 to have them living so far away, beyond me reach. Like probably every other father out there I have had to overcome an irrational desire to herd them up and bring them all home where I can protect them. But the truth is...I can’t protect them. That’s what I hate the most about COVID.

I hear stories about friends who are going forward full throttle with holiday plans, COVID be damned, convinced that it’s all just a huge misunderstanding at best or a conspiracy to make slaves of us all at worst. Ok... I wish them well. For me an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Besides, its 2020 and I’m not feeling very lucky.

Another Bedside Visit

Montgomery Duncan’s mother had died in her sleep. Slipped away without saying goodbye, unexpected and devastatingly final. Like any mother and son worthy of the names, much was left unsaid and unfinished. Their relationship had been strong and stable but their last conversation had been an argument. But he had no time to mourn properly because his father and the love of his mother’s life was now 87 and without her for the first time in 65 years. Edward Eugene Duncan had left Gladstone in 1943 on a Chesapeake and Ohio troop-train headed for San Francisco and then the South Pacific to fight the Japanese. His train chugged slowly past Blue Hill where a 13 year old Elizabeth Taylor sat on the steps and watched the billows of smoke rising from the engine disappearing into the morning mist, thinking about who might be on the train. She had a dream which had convinced her that she was going to meet and marry a man who rode past Blue Hill on that train one day. Three years later on the first day of her senior year in high school she discovered that a tall black haired older boy, back from the war, had been assigned the locker next to hers. They were both almost instantly smitten. Their decision to get married was a wildly unpopular one with practically everyone in the Taylor household. Edward was the son of share croppers and unworthy of a young girl from a family that possessed 700 acres of land. Despite their disapproval, Elizabeth and Edward were married at the Courthouse with only Elizabeth’s sister Rosemary representing the bride’s family. 

All of the Taylor family misgivings about Edward had eventually been forgotten when the couple started having children. By the time Montgomery had arrived, the fourth and last of the brood, all had been forgiven. The truth was that it was difficult to find fault with Edward. He was a pleasant man, strong and dependable, not afraid of hard work and a whiz with a rifle. He made Elizabeth happy. None of them could deny that. Eventually, Lizzy’s happiness and Edward’s quick smile won the day.

But when she passed away without warning, Montgomery simply couldn’t imagine how his father was going to manage without her. In sixty plus years of marriage they had spent not one single night apart. He would be lost without her, totally useless around the house, and impossibly lonely. As he had expected, things didn’t go well. His health rapidly declined and almost two years later to the day, Edward and Elizabeth were reunited in heaven. At least that’s what they both believed. Firmly and unequivocally. Montgomery’s parents were dead serious about their Christian faith, its teachings informing all aspects of their lives, guiding their decisions, commanding them to be better people, more loving and kind, more forgiving and generous than others thought they should be. “Lizzy,” friends would say, “You don’t have enough money to be giving it away to every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes along. Be reasonable!!” Her answer had always been some version of, “Well, maybe Tom, Dick and Harry need it more than I do!”

Eighteen months after her death, Montgomery brought his father some doughnuts one morning for breakfast, hoping the sight of sweets would brighten his day. He found him reading the paper in his recliner, his face sagging under the weight of loss and loneliness. He managed a smile when he saw his son walk in but it was a weak effort, not the over the top exaggerated one he usually managed to conjure up when one of his children came for a visit.

“How you feeling this morning, Pop?”

“Fit as a fiddle,” he replied, his stock answer. Everyday of his life he had been fit as a fiddle to anyone who bothered to ask.

         But something was wrong. Montgomery had learned to read his father’s moods, could see through his superficial declarations that everything was wonderful. Edward Duncan lived in mortal fear of becoming a burden to his children, hated the thought that they might be worried about him. So, he declared himself fit as a fiddle and hoped for no follow up questions. But this morning after a couple doughnuts Montgomery persisted.

“Pop, you don’t look like your self today. You have a rough night?”

He folded up his paper and placed it on the table beside his chair, laid his head back and closed his eyes. “I don’t sleep well some nights.”

Montgomery knew enough to not interrupt his father on the rare occasions when he offered up any information about his condition, no matter how vague. He listened quietly, hoping for something more specific. 

“Most nights I fall right asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. But then I wake up a few hours later and can’t get back to sleep.”

Montgomery noticed for the first time that his father’s eyes were red and puffier than usual. Had he been crying?

“That what happened last night?” Montgomery, leading the witness.

Edward folded his hands together in his lap and kept his eyes shut, preferring not to look at his son as he talked. “But, last night was different...”

Montgomery had always had a hard time figuring out his father. He was a man of great contradictions. He was powerfully built but as gentle as a lamb. He could be frequently eloquent but opted for silence, preferring to listen to others talk. He loved hard physical labor and had the powerful, gnarled, vice grip hands to prove it, but was as well read as any man he had ever known. Suddenly he was in the mood to talk.

“You know how your mother was. Remember how she seemed to know about things before they happened, that confounding clairvoyance of hers?”

Montgomery smiled and nodded.

“I’m not sure I ever told you kids about the time...this was before you and Diane were born. Allen and Gail were little, not more than five or six. We lived over on the south side and we would travel a lot back and forth between there and Blue Hill. We must have made the trip at least a hundred times. Well, one Saturday morning we were headed up the country about twenty minutes outside of Midlothian when all of a sudden your mother said, ‘Edward! Edward! Stop the car, pull over!!’ Well, it scared me half to death. I thought maybe she was sick and needed to throw up or something. But no, she was pointing at this house up on a hill. There was a long driveway lined with magnolia trees and a nice brick two story house with a big fancy set of steps out front. ‘That house!! I’ve been in that house.’ Well, I started laughing out loud, ‘Lizzy,’ I said, ‘We have driven past this house a hundred times in the past three years. Unless you drove out here without me or visited it when you were a child, I can assure you that you have never been in that house. You know how I know that? First of all, before you married me you had never left Buckingham County, and second of all, you don’t drive!’ But she was insistent. ‘Edward, I had a dream last night that I was in that house. I can see it as plain as day. There’s a beautiful porcelain pitcher sitting on a half circle table underneath a gorgeous gold-framed mirror right when you come in the front door on the right. Then a huge library to the left with a fireplace and leather books all the way to the ceiling all around. Oh, and a piano in the corner.’ She went on and on describing the inside of the house. Finally I said, ‘Well, fine. But why did you want to pull off the highway?’ I knew I was in trouble when she answered, ‘because I need to see for myself. I am going to go up there and ask them if I can look at their house!’ You know your mother, there wasn’t a one in a million chance that I was going to talk her out of such a foolish idea, so the next thing I know, there we are standing on this stranger’s front porch ringing the doorbell. Luckily the woman who answered the door couldn’t have been nicer and invited us in straight away. Within five minutes, the two of them were as thick as thieves! Then I noticed the library and the leather books and the piano. I turned and saw the pitcher and the mirror. Son, it was exactly as your mother had described it! It was the strangest thing I had ever seen.”

As fascinating as his story was, Montgomery had a feeling that there was something else going on with his father, something that he was working up his nerve to share. Then he noticed the tears in his eyes.

“Mother was like that, of course. She had that strange relationship with the world around her. She saw things that nobody else saw, heard things, felt things that nobody else did.”

Montgomery nodded his head in agreement. None of this was a revelation. Everyone in the family knew that Elizabeth was...different. They had all preferred to describe it as her being, sensitive to the spiritual world, carefully avoiding any suggestion that this was anything other than a finely tuned and thoroughly Christian sensitivity. His father continued...

“Well, last night when I woke up, your mother was standing at the foot of my bed over by the window. At first she was staring out the window, but then she turned and smiled at me. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just laid there and smiled back. She didn’t say anything either.  She just glanced out the window then back at me. She was wearing a white nightgown and she looked just like she looked when we were first married...”

At this point, he couldn’t continue. Emotion overcame him and he cried openly, something that his son had never before seen. He got up and rushed to his side. “Oh Pop, why are you crying? It sounds like it was beautiful.”

“I’m crying because I miss her!” Edward seemed frustrated that his son would ask such a ridiculous question. Didn’t anyone understand the depths of his grief, the pain of his loneliness? “But I’m also crying because I don’t think it’s right, Montgomery. I’m a Christian man. I’m not supposed to believe in ghosts.”

Montgomery didn’t understand enough of the theological basis for such a statement and didn’t care to, and resisted the urge to say something snarky like, “What about the Holy Ghost?” Instead, in one of his finer moments as a son, managed to say, “Pop. Tell me something. When you saw Mom smiling at you from the window, how did it make you feel? Were you frightened? Afraid?”

“No. I was never once afraid. I felt warm all over. I was so happy to see her face again. She was so beautiful...”

“Well, how can that be a bad thing? How can that be from the devil? Seems to me that if you took comfort from her presence, maybe she was sent by God. Instead of thinking of her as a ghost, maybe you should think of her as an angel.”

It had been a invaluable gift that the son had given the father...permission to believe in the goodness of God, permission to believe that he hadn’t suddenly become a heretic, and permission to take comfort where he found it.

As Montgomery was driving home it occurred to him that when his mother had visited him bedside the night before his surgery, she had been wearing a white nightgown, and he hadn’t even recognized her at first, her hair had been so black and her face so alive with the light of youth.

The Man In The White Suit

She was only seven years old when it happened. It was in the summer, a dreadfully hot day. The breakfast dishes had been cleared off the table and piled high in the sink, flies buzzing around the table as her mother wiped it clean with a dishcloth. Edna Taylor was a large woman with an unruly head of hair which defied all attempts to keep it out of her face. Long strands fell this way and that as she cupped all the crumbs into her hand at the end of the table after a final swoop. Her seven year old daughter looked up at her from the door to the back porch, sensing that something wasn’t right. Edna looked worried and weak. 

“Lizzy, go on outside and play. Your mother needs some time alone. Run along!” Elizabeth heard the tone of her mother’s voice and understood it to be an order, not a suggestion. She bounded down the back steps and ran around to the front of the house where it was cooler. She looked down the field that sloped away from the great, white salt box house that went by the name of Blue Hill. The field of brown straw, scorched by the relentless summer sun, stretched all the way to the river. Elizabeth sat herself down on a stump of a tree that had been cut down earlier in the year after it had been struck by lightening. Edna had thought it a bad omen, a sign that her sick boy wasn’t long for this world. But that was months ago, and lately Chesty had seemed to be getting better. Elizabeth sat and watched the water drifting by slowly in the distance. She heard the whistle first then saw the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad train coming up from Gladstone on the other side of the river. She could smell the smoke from the engine some days, but today the wind, what little there was, was headed in the wrong direction. Still, she watched the train until it disappeared, worrying about her mother and her sick brother. 

It was just the three of them this morning. All the men were working and wouldn’t be back until lunch when the kitchen would come alive with noise and fuss as her father, three brothers and older sister came back to the house to eat. It always irked Elizabeth that her father wouldn’t allow her to go with them. “You’ve gotta stay with Momma, Lizzy. What’s gonna happen if she needs help with Chesty,” he would explain. 

Chesterton Taylor had been born in 1925 and had surprised the doctors by surviving his first year, then surprised them every year since. He had been born with what they called a weak heart and wasn’t given much of a chance. The fact that he was now twelve years old had been a testament to either God’s grace or an extra helping of the famous Taylor stubbornness gene. It hadn’t been much of a life though, he having spent much of it bedridden and weak as water. Elizabeth loved him, felt sorry for him, and on some level envied him their mother’s attention, But even a seven year old knew not to admit to such a thing. 

Suddenly Elizabeth thought she heard crying. Had the sound of the train drowned it out? How long had she been crying? Where was she? She ran around the house and saw her sitting on the steps holding her head in her hands, sobbing, great anguished cries of despair and heartache. Elizabeth ran up and wrapped her tiny arms around her inconsolable mother. “What’s the matter, Momma? Is it Chesty?”

Edna buried her face in her apron, wiped away the tears then lifted Elizabeth into her lap. “Chesty passed away, Lizzy. His time for suffering is finally over, he’s gone home.”

“But, this is his home,” Elizabeth cried.

“No Lizzy. This is just our earthly home.”

Thus went the strangest conversation of young Elizabeth’s short life for fifteen minutes or so as she rocked back and forth in her mother’s strong arms, not understanding but taking comfort in her odd words. Then they both saw him.

Blue Hill was a house that rested at the end of a two mile one-lane dirt road that slithered down the middle of the 700 acre farm like a serpent. To the north lay cow pastures, a couple of barns and on the highest point, the family cemetery. To the south, fields of corn and soybeans and more barns. From the back steps of the house you could see a car approaching from half a mile away, a tail of dust billowing behind it with the soft rumble of a distant engine. Neither of them saw or heard him approach. They just looked up and there he was, the morning sun shining off his white three-piece suit. He wore a white boater hat and his brown wingtip shoes looked like they had just been buffed clean. Not a trace of dust. Sitting at his feet was a Jack Russell terrier, his pink tongue bouncing up and down. Neither Elizabeth nor her mother felt any fear at the strange sight of a man in a clean suit who seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. When they looked up at him he tipped his hat and smiled down at them. 

“Good morning, Mrs. Taylor. I can see you’ve been crying. What’s troubling you?”

Elizabeth had never seen a kinder smile or heard a more soothing voice. She felt warm inside as he spoke. She heard her mother’s anguished answer, “It’s my boy. He’s dead.”

The dog walked forward, jumped up in her lap, curled around and laid down. The man took off his hat as if to acknowledge their loss then said, “I know, Mrs. Taylor. I’m so sorry. It’s a terrible thing to lose a child, especially one who has been sick for so long.” He then walked over and sat down beside her on the step, he on one side and Elizabeth on the other, both holding on to her. They rocked back and forth together while the dog slept peacefully in her mother’s lap.

Elizabeth couldn’t remember how long he was there. Time was a difficult concept for a seven year old. It felt like a long time but it might have only been a few minutes. Regardless, his presence had a calming effect on her mother. She had stopped sobbing, was no longer shaking with the force of her grief. The tears had dried up by the time he left. He had stood up slowly. The dog jumped down from her lap and joined him. His parting words were simple, “The men will be back soon.” Then the two of them walked back up the road. Elizabeth watched them get smaller and smaller, noticed the dust that their feet kicked up as they walked along, saw the sun shining off his boater hat. 

When her father, brothers and sister returned for lunch, they all began crying at the news. They gathered around Chesty’s bed and wept. Rosemary, Elizabeth’s only sister, was particularly distraught, draping herself over his dead body while she wailed. Her brothers mostly stood at a distance, arms crossed stiffly over their chests, eyes rimmed with tears. Her father held his filthy hat in both hands, lower lip trembling for a minute until he got a hold of himself. Then he said, “Ok, that’s enough of that,” as he gathered everyone up, led them out of the bedroom and closed the door. Edna served lunch. Everyone ate slowly, in silence. Elizabeth had never seen her family do anything quietly. They were loud people, always hollering and screaming about one thing or another, not with anger or malice, they were just loud. They spoke to each other loudly, worked loudly, even ate loudly. The clatter and tumult were an incessant part of Elizabeth’s life. Now, the seven of them sat around the long oak kitchen table so quietly you could hear the stirring of fly’s wings.

“Did ya’ll see the man wearing the white suit?” Edna asked, breaking the silence. They all exchanged glances. Her father answered, “What man?”

“You must have passed him on the road,” she insisted. “He just left us thirty minutes before ya’ll drove up. He had a little dog with him.”

“We didn’t see a man or a dog on the road. Who was he?”

Edna insisted that they couldn’t possibly have missed a man with such a sharp suit and fine dog. She told them all about his visit and as she talked they all began exchanging worried glances. Finally, Edna dropped the subject and the silence returned. Later that night when she tucked Elizabeth in bed she whispered in her ear, “Lizzy, that man was an angel sent from God to comfort us. Don’t you ever forget it, ya hear?”

And, she hadn’t. But oddly, had never bothered to share the story with her son until now, the night before he was to undergo open heart surgery to repair a faulty mitral valve. As she sat on the end of his bed regaling him with yet another creepy paranormal family secret, it occurred to Montgomery Duncan that his mother’s family history was chocked full of this sort of thing, Blue Hill being a house shot through with Gothic mystery. He made a mental note that if he survived his pending procedure, he would attempt to get to the bottom of it all. There were so many unanswered questions about the Taylors, so many odd tales. The least interesting part of this particular story was the fact that the beautiful woman sitting at the end of his bed telling it had been dead and in the ground for eleven months, having died in her sleep of heart failure herself, there being two things that prominently ran in the Taylor family, bad hearts and bedside visits from the dead. Montgomery chalked this one up to the delightful drug cocktail pulsing through his veins from the shiny IV bag beside his bed. But what to make of the half dozen other stories of premonitions, warnings and reassurance that had been provided from various dead Taylor Uncles, Aunts and Cousins through the years?

“What are you saying Ma, are you an angel sent to comfort me?”

“No. I’m just your mother.”

And with that, she was gone. Montgomery drifted off to sleep thinking about his grandmother, her dirty apron, the black wood stove in the dark kitchen, that heavy picnic style table that ran the length of the room. He pictured her turning from her cooking to see him standing at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t sleep well in the huge red bedroom upstairs, always woke up before dawn and always found her busy in the kitchen.

“Come over here, child,” she would smile. “Give your Nanny a hug.”

She would envelope him in her apron and it always smelled like sausage. She would tussle his hair then sit him down at the table and give him a hot biscuit. 

“How come you always wake up so early?”

]

Montgomery never told her the truth. He never told her that Blue Hill scared the hell out of him at night. The big room upstairs was painted blood red and the only light was a single clear light bulb which hung from a long chord from the middle of the ceiling. For reasons that he didn’t understand the light always swayed a little from side to side sending shadows slithering across the walls. For a five year old boy this was the stuff from which nightmares were made. But all it took to break the spell was a visit to Nanny’s kitchen and the rising sun peaking through the screen door. For Montgomery, Blue Hill was part paradise and part haunted house. The haunting always happened at night making the arrival of the morning sun feel like paradise.

A nurse with kind eyes wearing a mask asked him to count backwards from ten. He felt a soft tingle in his arm, then a blast of cold air, then nothing. When next he opened his eyes he was hovering above the bobbing head of his surgeon looking down at the bright red blood surrounded by sky blue napkins in the middle of the table. He heard the buzz and gurgle of the ventilator and picked up parts of a conversation between the nurses about the results of a football game. Then over in a corner behind a tray of instruments he saw his mother staring intently at her son’s open chest. She was swaying from side to side with one arm raised towards heaven. This had always been how it was with Elizabeth Taylor Duncan, always turning up at the oddest times in the oddest places, always knowing something she had no way of knowing, understanding things she couldn’t possibly understand. Montgomery knew at that moment that he would survive the operation going on below. He would make a full and complete recovery. There suddenly wasn’t a doubt in his mind.

Family Stories

Montgomery took a break from his writing, poured a cup of coffee and picked up the gold framed portrait of his parents from the gallery of pictures stacked across the top of the spinet piano in his library. Elizabeth’s smile was gentle, understated, as if she knew not to get too complacent. Life had a way of ambushing happiness. Truth be told, life as she had experienced it, was a series of shocks, unforeseen body blows administered by either providence or fate, that were meant to be overcome by force of will and unquestioned faith in the sovereignty of God. There was no room for bitterness, no time for selfishness and no point in questioning one’s lot in life. You get what you get and you don’t pitch a fit, she would say. Montgomery placed the picture back on the piano, sat back down and begin to think about what was perhaps his mother’s most difficult body blow. 

He had been eight years old. He was alone with his mother in their tiny cramped apartment in New Orleans, the result of her husband’s midlife religious conversation. In five short years since he had seen the light, everything about their lives had changed. Edward Duncan, with a wife and four kids, had quit the best job he ever had, enrolled in college and taken the graveyard shift at a factory in town to pay the bills, all in obedience to what he claimed was the audible voice of God calling him into the ministry while driving to work on Jefferson Davis highway in his beat up Plymouth Fury III. New Orleans was home to the Seminary to which he was accepted as the oldest student of the class of 1968. Now, six Duncans were shoehorned into a two bedroom apartment in the hottest, most humid place in the world.

It was another June 5th, a momentous date in Taylor family history, this time in 1966 when a sharp knock on the door surprised Montgomery’s mother. She had been cutting up vegetables in the kitchen and dropped the knife on the tile floor at the sound of it. She quickly dried her hands on a towel and opened the door. A tall dark haired man in a stiff black suit and a Bible in his hands stood in the doorway. He looked to be sweating around the collar of his stiffly starched shirt. His eyes were thin and glassy, his extended hand ghastly white and shaking. The angel of death.

“Elizabeth Taylor?” He asked politely.

Montgomery had been on the floor in front of the grainy black and white television with aluminum foil wrapped around its rabbit ears, trying to watch The Lone Ranger, but the appearance of the stranger at the door had turned his head just in time to see his mother lift both hands to cover her mouth as she responded, “Oh Lord, it’s my mother, isn’t it?”

Twenty four hours later the Duncans were crammed into a 1962 Chevy Impala station wagon headed back to Blue Hill for Edna Taylor’s funeral. Montgomery had picked up tidbits of the details surrounding the tragedy but not enough to understand. But as the roar of the recapped tires against the interstate hummed him to sleep he wondered how it was that his mother knew who had died before the weary man in the black suit had even spoken.

On the morning of the 5th on Blue Hill, Edna was scurrying around trying to get everything together for her weekly trip into Buckingham Courthouse with her impatient, whirling dervish of a husband, Madison Taylor, older brother of Uriah and the clear alpha dog of his loud and boisterous clan. Montgomery’s grandfather had always been a source of fascination to him. His voice boomed out from his throat like the words had been shot out of a cannon which always startled him. He was perpetually in motion, a man of action who never slowed down for anything, even to eat. Montgomery remembered watching in awe as his larger than life grandfather devoured a bowl of cereal in what seemed to be a matter of seconds. The man was stone cold deaf and no doubt could hear very little of what his talkative grandson was saying while he followed him around as he did his morning chores in the barns at Blue Hill. This morning was unlike any other, Madison Taylor was in a hurry. He had loaded the metal jugs of milk in the back of the pick up truck and had been ready to leave fifteen minutes before Edna finally climbed into her seat. “You’ll be late for your own funeral,” he teased. “Maybe so,” she responded, “but I’ll be well dressed.”

The dirt road that split the property was notoriously hilly and narrow, its one lane barely wide enough for one car, let alone two. As it left the farm and got within a stone’s throw of the State road, there was a steep hill where if you made the trip in the morning you looked directly into the sun, temporarily blinding you until you reached the crest. At the top of the hill on this morning, Madison Taylor’s pickup truck was going fast, wheels spinning, trying to get a grip in the loose gravel. When he broke through the bright sunlight it was too late. He collided head on with a vehicle breaking through the sun at the same time sending Edna, in the days before seatbelts, headlong into the windshield. She died at the scene and for all practical purposes her death put an end to the idyllic life the Taylor family had built at Blue Hill. Within a couple years a grief stricken Madison Taylor had sold the house and land. He couldn’t bear being reminded of Edna at every turn in the great empty house. The loss of Blue Hill being the biggest ripple from Edna Taylor’s tragic and untimely death.

An eight year old’s memories are famously obscure and befuddled. Such was the case with Montgomery Duncan’s as he tried to piece together the details of the funeral. He remembered not being allowed to go inside the church. He was kept in a car in the parking lot with a group of other young cousins. It was 1966 and perhaps the thought was that young children might not be ready for an open casket. The one image that remained crystal clear was that of two strong uncles holding each arm of his oldest cousin, Richie who seemed beyond consolation as he staggered into the church. Richie was the oldest son of Edna’s first born war hero, Johnnie, the one who had appeared to her the night before D-Day twenty one years to the day of her death. As her first grandson, Richie had been particularly beloved. He had loved his grandmother back with equal devotion, so her loss had hit him especially hard. But the sight of him being helped into the church, so distraught and overwhelmed had brought tears to Montgomery’s eyes. It had been Richie who had been behind the wheel of the car that collided with Madison’s pick up truck. The trauma the accident would prove to be the most difficult chapter of the Taylor family’s history.

Richie went on to live an extraordinary life, overcoming the sort of tragedy that might have forever damaged a lesser man. Within three years he was earning combat medals in Vietnam as an Army Ranger. Upon returning to the States after the war, he married well, raised a family of beautiful children, and worked heroically in local law enforcement for years. For Montgomery, Richie Taylor would forever be a hero, a man who overcame the tragic fate that had visited him on a clear morning in the summer of 1966.

                                                                                                              ###

Edna Taylor tossed and turned on the night of June 4th, 1944. It had been a rough Monday. Her knees were aching from being on her feet all day. Her back throbbed from a muscle she had pulled trying to lift a sack of flour from the truck that morning. But there was something else contributing to her insomnia. Her oldest boys were in the Army and rumors had been flying all around Buckingham County that something was up. Something over there. In all the time they had been gone she had received precious little communication, her boys not being big letter writers. What letters she did get were all weeks after the fact. They had survived North Africa. They had made it through Sicily. Still, she worried all day every day that she would get a visit from the man in the black car, the angel of death from the Defense Department. Every time she would see dust rising on the road in the distance her heart would skip a beat. Her husband would tell her, “Johnnie and Billy can take care of themselves. Rest easy, Edna.” But, at night after he had fallen asleep she was left in the bleak darkness of Blue Hill to battle her doubts and fears alone.

She wrapped her gown tightly around her shoulders and walked downstairs to the kitchen. Even though it was summertime it was still cool in the house late at night. She lifted a biscuit from under the checkered cloth of the bread basket, spread some jam on it and ate while she stared off into the distance. She thought about how painful it had been to lose Chesty. She tried to imagine if she had it in her to survive losing another. The tears overcame her quickly. She threw the biscuit to the side and buried her head in her hands, weeping like only a grieving mother can.

She felt a warm hand on her shoulder. She immediately regretted her outburst. Her husband needed his sleep more than anyone and all of her blubbering had woken him up. But when she looked up she felt a rush of cool air. Her heart raced. She could feel the hairs on her neck standing up as she looked into the face of her oldest, Johnnie. 

He smiled down at her, his wire rimmed glasses shimmering in the lantern light. He was in his dress uniform, medals on his left breast pocket, boots sharply polished and gleaming. He spoke, “Hello, Momma. It’s me, Johnnie. I don’t have much time but I wanted to let you know that me and Billy are going to be fine. We don’t want you worrying yourself to death, you hear? We love you and we promise we will be back before you know it.”

And just like that he vanished and she was alone in the kitchen, her heart pounding but now filled with joy. When weeks later word came that both of them had been on the beaches at Normandy, Edna Taylor, like Mary the Mother of Jesus 2000 years before, pondered these things in her heart. It would be years before she told the story.

By the time the story got told to Montgomery, his mother had been a bit foggy with the details. Did he appear in the kitchen or at her bedside? Was he wearing his dress uniform or his bloodied and stained combat clothes? But in every iteration he had heard, the consistent facts were that on the night before the D-Day assault in France, her tank-driving, war hero son had made a visit to Blue Hill to reassure his mother that he was going to make it.

But as Montgomery wrote the story down it occurred to him that the Taylor family lore wasn’t just stories of comforting visitations. Like all family histories, it’s a mixture of comedy and tragedy, ghosts from the past who bring both life and death. Just four years after D-Day came such a story.

Doug, What’s With All The Jokes?

For the past couple of weeks I have been overcome by an irresistible desire to...change the subject. From what to what? Well, from the election to practically anything else. Want to enter in to an in-depth discussion about quantum physics? I’m game. How about a riveting debate about the proper way to clean grout in the shower? Sure! Hell, I’ll even engage you in a hardy exchange of ideas about (gulp)...soccer! But, judging from my Facebook feed, I have been largely unsuccessful. It has not been for lack of trying.

My preferred technique has been to share with the world the selection of truly awful jokes that I send to Pam Cole every morning. As she might say, “Why should I be the only one who suffers?” For example, about thirty minutes ago I lit her up with these:

-A pirate walks into a bar with a paper towel on his head. The bartender asks,“Hey, what’s with the paper towel?” The pirate answers, “Arrgh, I’ve got a Bounty on me head...”

-Last night I had a dream that I weighed less than a thousandth of a gram....I was like, 0mg.

-How do you contact the spirit of a dead Italian?  With a Luigi board.

-Did I ever tell you about the fat girl I dated once? I’m telling you, she was one fat girl. We met at the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade...she was wearing ropes.

Maybe many of you are getting annoyed with my flippancy at a time of such political and social tumult. The thinking goes this way...At a time when the very foundations of the country are being rocked, where the future of our democracy is at stake and our world is being visited by a relentlessly spreading viral pandemic, it’s time to get serious!!

My answer is...if a time of such foundation rocking, pandemic spreading chaos isn’t a time for terrible jokes, when, pray tell, is?

That’s easy for you to say, Doug. Your guy won. Not at all. If you think my volume of jokes is excessive now, I can guarantee you that it would be off the charts if Trump won. Look, despair is an insidious plague on the human mind. It must be fought with every tool at our disposal. To give in to it invites debilitating unhappiness. Despair robs a person of the capacity for joy, it blinds people to beauty. It is the vowed enemy of a flourishing life. 

So, in the face of life’s worst moments, I simply choose to find humor where I can. That doesn’t make me unserious. In fact, I am deadly serious when it comes to the business of avoiding despair. For me it is a daily imperative, to which there is no alternative.