Tammy Is Visited by Her Dead Grandmother

Howard / DEAD CEMETERY /

Tammy Is Visited by Her Dead Grandmother

Tammy McPherson bolted upright in bed. A noise had woken her, but she didn’t know what it was. Where was her antique quilt stand? Her oak dresser? The entire room looked foreign in the meager light that bled between the parted curtains.

She remembered where she was. The Hunter’s Paradise Motel at the corner of Route 6 and Annastasis Creek Road. She was no hunter, and this fleabag was far from paradise, but it was the only place to stay on the Creek, and she was into quick and cheap for this trip. After a five-hour drive from Philly, she was exhausted and wanted only a good night’s rest before Uncle Roger’s funeral tomorrow, followed by the long trip back to civilization and sanity.

The Potter County, Pennsylvania, motto, “God’s Country,” was a definite misnomer. Godforsaken was more like it. A thousand square miles of deer-infested, tree-covered hills and sparse one-lane roads—not all paved—clustered with old houses, trailers, and ramshackle hunting camps was home to fewer than 20,000 people, and she was thrilled to no longer call it hers. She’d left after college and had returned only once, for Aunt Nancy’s funeral.

That was one hell of a fiasco, what with her Uncle Roger making a such a ruckus. Poor Cousin Scotty.

The rapping made her jump, and Tammy clutched the bedsheet closer. The material smelled musty, so she lowered it again. Was someone at the door? It better not be her brother. She’d been out of touch with Brian since she’d left the Creek and couldn’t imagine getting along with him any better now than she did then. Sociopaths don’t change.

The knocking continued. She reached for the phone on the nightstand, but this cheap no-tell motel had none. She groped for her cell phone. No bars. Probably no cell tower for miles. Such an investment would be useless in an area with so few customers and so many hills.

The banging came again. Not at the door, but the window. Despite her racing heart, Tammy forced herself out of bed. Who in God’s name could it be? Some drunk hunter trying to find his buddy’s room? No, June wasn’t deer season.

The only window was in the wall opposite the door. If she had to, she could run out the room door. No one attended the front desk overnight, the lady had told her at check-in. Tammy had no idea who lived in the dump across the road, let alone whether they would let her in to use the phone. Her best bet was to make a run for her car.

The rapping became tapping. Recognition germinated within her. It was the cadence of a song she knew from long ago, although she couldn’t name it now. She paused at the center of the room, shivering in her nightgown. She could at least see who was out there before she took for the parking lot.

Tammy sidestepped the bed and cautiously approached the window. The tapping was a ticking now, barely audible. She parted the cheap muslin curtains and peered out.

A single figure stood among the silhouetted brambles. Tammy was about to scream, but the stranger wasn’t a man. It was an old woman.

What are doing out there, behind the motel? You lose your way to your room? 

Or was she a local, some senior citizen with dementia who had wandered up the road after putting the cat out?

Unlikely. The woman was dressed not in a nightgown, but in a beautiful blue-flowered dress with a white lace collar that glowed in the moonlight. And like the tune she was tapping, something seemed familiar about her.

The old woman motioned for her to open the window, but Tammy held back. She did lean closer, though, to get a better look at the woman’s face. When she realized who it was, she cried out.

“Nunna! Nunna!”

It was her father’s mother, Dorothy McPherson. A saint if there ever was one. Yet it couldn’t be. She’d been dead for twenty years.

Tammy pinched herself. She wasn’t dreaming after all.

Nunna smiled at her and beckoned again with a wrinkled hand, one Tammy remembered as gentle and soft.

A flood of emotions rushed in from the past. Nunna in her homemade apron making delicious fried-cakes, her cheeks flushed from rolling the dough. Nunna scattering feed to the chickens, teaching Tammy to putter in their own language until they both laughed and the birds scattered. Nunna patting her back, in time with a whispered song about Little Bo Beep, who had lost her sheep. Tammy wiped her tears and fumbled to open the window.

“Nunna? It’s me, Tammy!”

Nunna turned away but continued motioning with her hand, looking over her shoulder.

What do you want me to do? Where are you going? 

Nunna slipped through the underbrush, heading for the end of the row of rooms.

Tammy couldn’t climb through the window, but she didn’t want to lose her grandmother—perhaps she’d come to deliver a message for the family in their time of grief. She wanted to know what it was.

She threw on her jacket and grabbed her keys from the nightstand. Outside, the night was cool and quiet after the rain. She hurried down the cracked walk before the other room doors and rounded the corner of the motel. Nunna McPherson stood up ahead on the road, gazing over her shoulder and arcing her arm to draw Tammy near.

Tammy hustled after her, wanting so bad to hug her one more time, to hear her comforting voice and see the smile that lit up her eyes. But she couldn’t catch up. She didn’t need to pinch herself again. From the pain in her side, she couldn’t be dreaming. She stopped to catch her breath.

“Nunna… wait up. Stop. Where are you taking me?”

Nunna halted and turned, her dress twirling in the night breeze. It was the dress she’d been buried in. She held out her hands and then clasped them to her heart.

“Wait,” Tammy said. “Wait here, and I’ll get the car. Then we can go there together.”

Nunna waited, hands at her sides.

Tammy ran back toward the motel, avoiding the puddles from the earlier rain, fearing that when she returned her grandmother would be gone. She glanced over her shoulder, but Nunna still stood there in the middle of the road.

She finally reached the parking lot, her side hurting more than ever.

When you get home, you’ve got to get in shape, girl.

She unlocked her Subaru, climbed into the driver’s seat, and started the engine. She dropped it into gear and tore out of the dirt lot and up the road.

Nunna McPherson had continued on, marching swiftly toward wherever she was going. Tammy stepped on the gas. The car lurched forward, yet no matter how much faster she drove, she couldn’t catch up. Her grandmother wasn’t running. She strode at a brisk but stately pace. The roadside tiger lilies, closed like alien pods, flew by in a blur. Yet Tammy never caught up with her.

Finally, Nunna stepped off the road to the left and stopped. Tammy braked and pulled onto the grass beside her. She clambered out of the vehicle, ready to embrace her grandmother, but she had already moved toward the building.

It was the old Grange Hall, now abandoned, rising black against the starlit sky. Her grandparents and parents had attended Grange meetings as much to socialize as they did to discuss farming life and animal husbandry. In fact, her parents had started dating after they were paired at a May cakewalk. She herself had attended Girl Scout meetings here and community Christmas parties where big Wendell Osterman, dressed as Santa, handed out oranges. The structure was decrepit and boarded up now. It had lain unused since before she’d moved away.

“Nunna, why won’t you stop? Wait for me, please, won’t you?”

Her grandmother stood on the crumbling front steps, the headlights glinting yellow in her eyes. Then she turned and clawed at the planks barring the door. They clattered to the stoop. She opened the door and disappeared inside.

Tammy dashed for the building, climbed the steps, careful of the fallen boards, and entered the dark hall. Up ahead, her grandmother paused, glowing with a light of her own. She beckoned once again and descended the stairs to the basement.

In all her years, Tammy had never been downstairs in the Grange Hall. It was off-limits to the Girl Scouts, the door always locked. At the annual Halloween party, she and her girlfriends used to whisper behind their hands about the fate of naughty children, missing farmhands, and animals offered in sacrifice.

Her heart trip-hammering in her chest, Tammy followed her grandmother, who glowed faintly, down the creaking stairs. “Nunna? Why on earth have you led me here?”

At the bottom, Nunna turned and spread her arms with a beatific smile.

Assaulted by the odor of dank earth, Tammy stepped into her embrace, shocked that Nunna’s hands were icy.

“Nunna, what—”

The old woman opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came forth. Instead, out gushed a torrent of slimy white vomit that blinded Tammy, covered her, and numbed her senses to oblivion.

Copyright 2018 Lee Allen Howard