Free Tina Mcelroy Ansa by The Hand I Fan With Page B

of Mulberry. The house was haunted.
    Lena had done everything she could from what she had heard and read to calm the spirits of her family’s house: burning candles, splashing holy water around, burying one of her braids in the backyard near the stream. Nothing worked.
    She knew that part of the problem was hers. Not only had Nellie thrown Lena’s caul tea out, but her birth caul had not been saved or preserved with any kind of respect, either. She knew that because her grandmama’s ghost had told her so on the night of her funeral the only time she had ever come back to her.
    Her grandmama’s ghost had made her put on her slippers first, and taking her outside in the night, had pointed to the very spot behind the house down by the little stream that ran into the woods where Nellie, in disgust and ignorance, had burned the dried skin from her daughter’s birth.
    “Your caul is gone forever,” Grandmama’s ghost had lamented the loss of Lena’s treasure. But Lena had not seen it as a loss. Now she could hardly bear to look down toward the stream and woods behind her family house.
    She would have sold the house and property in a minute if the town had let her. But she couldn’t bear the thought of being questioned about her actions every time she showed her face.
    “So you
sold
your mama and daddy’s house to
strangers
!??!” she could just hear people inquiring over and over.
    “Shoot, if it wasn’t for Mama and Daddy, I don’t think I’d ever go back into that house,” she’d told Sister one day over the phone.
    But she had to fight like a madwoman ten years before to keep townspeople from assuming she was moving back there when Jonah and Nellie were killed in the crash of Miss
Lizzie
, their twin-engine Beechcraft.
    They flew around so much. Jonah, proud of his pilot’s wings and of Nellie’s acuity in learning to fly, and navigate, too, would jump in that plane and fly off at the drop of a hat. He had taken to flying in the same way he had embraced railroad travel. They flew to Washington, D.C., for the weekend. They flew to Atlanta for dinner at Jonah’s favorite restaurant. They flew to the Georgia coast for fresh seafood. They flew to the Florida Keys to watch the sun set into the waters of the Gulf. They flew to Miami to take a three-day cruise to the Bahamas. They even flew to Las Vegas and came back richer.
    Jonah—still handsome and charming, his dark brown skin unlined, his thick black hair graying at the temples along with his bushy mustache, his black eyes still dancing—had, as people in Mulberry said, “come in.”
    “Well, it look like Nellie hung in there long enough with Jonah ’til he stop running around all over Mulberry with other women and come on in,” one woman would shout to another as they sat under beauty shop hair dryers.
    “Yeah, and the two of them actually seem to be enjoying theyselves,” the other would add. “I know I wouldn’t be getting in no little plane like that at the drop of a hat. I guess you have to live with a man that long before you can trust him with your very life like that.”
    In the same way that people in Mulberry had said all his life, “Jonah know he love a train,” they later said, “Jonah know he love him a plane.”
    Years before their death, Frank Petersen, Lena’s friend and confidant who had worked as a houseman for Jonah and Nellie and then in Lena’s own home until he weakened and died, had predicted their demise. He would say to the room in general from time to time, as he moved around the house on Forest Avenue or her house out by the river, cleaning and washing and sweeping with his brown felt hat pulled down on his head, “They probably gon’ die in that plane.”
    The one time Lena heard him mutter this as she raced around looking for the white silk scarves Jonah and Nellie liked to wear when they flew, she had to restrain herself from hitting the grizzled old man.
    “Don’t ever say that again, Frank Petersen,” she