after A House with Bottle Trees, Simpson County, photography by Eudora Welty (USA) 1941
It was their third night in the new house, and Walter still couldn’t sleep. His wife was restless, too, tossing and turning and constantly sitting up to fiddle with the fan.
Born and raised in California, the heat was not new to them. But there was a restlessness here somehow, a nervous undercurrent thrumming from the floorboards. The house needed work, which they would get to, once they were finished unpacking. In time they would get used to the new place and feel at home.
Walter shuffled to the fridge and poured a tumbler of lemonade, standing in his undershirt and nothing else in darkness. The humid air was thick with perfume; mimosa, magnolia, myrtle. The moon was high. He leaned over the sink, close to the screen, and saw it glinting off the rainbow of glass bottles on the tree in the neighbour’s yard, light dancing through them like fireflies.
Celia. A peculiar, spindly old woman. Now he remembered: “No one sleeps in that house,” she’d warned cryptically when they’d made small talk before moving in. “Bet you got the place cheap. The old maids didn’t last a year. Carried out together with their eyes frozen open. Who knows what they seen.”
Walter shuddered recalling it. No wonder he’d been wide awake for days. According to their realtor, the Jones’ sisters had passed of ripe old age, and that made sense, one each of them being on either side of ninety years.
The yards on the block had lush, colourful gardens and an eclectic assortment of whimsical oddments and doodads, wrought-iron chickens and seashells and chubby angels. And most of them had the requisite tree strung with cobalt blue bottles, some adding green and purple and red. It was a popular decoration among southerners. Some old timers still believed the bottle trees enticed the restless spirits into the glass and kept them from entering their houses.
Celia had the biggest tree, with hundreds of dusty old liquor glass, flagons, and jugs rigged up with twine. He and Beth both liked the folksy vibe of it all. Since they’d moved in, they’d mostly seen Celia rocking on her wraparound porch with iced tea and the Scriptures in hand. Her house was, fittingly, painted haint blue, the same pale colour as a sleepy sky. “This tricks ‘em into passing through and flying away,” Celia had said. “Otherwise they keep at you until they tire you to death. Only the word of God and the old ways can save you.”
By the second week, Beth had set everything up nicely inside and Walter had cleaned out the Jones’ leftovers from the garage and yard. He had taken a mountain of empty boxes to the recycling depot in town. They both had dark circles around their eyes. Walter was growing concerned: he would be starting the new job come Monday and needed to be sharp to learn the ropes. Beth was jumpy, unnerved by the rattlings of the old house. They both heard strange noises, staccato yelping from the edges of the woods behind the yard. Walter was sure these were sounds from the feral dingoes that ran the swamps.
One early morning when he went out to retrieve his newspaper, he saw Celia sweeping glass shards into a dustpan under her tree and he went over to ask if he could help. She shook her head. “Many bottles broke during the night,” she explained grimly. “Sometimes that happens. When the evil is strong enough, the glass bursts open because it cannot contain them.”
She busied herself tying new ones to the lower branches. Walter helped to steady her as she reached awkwardly to tether her twine to higher spots. He suggested gently that perhaps the rain overnight had loosened some of the vessels and broken them. Her black walnut eyes darted sharply about. “The stubborn don’t believe,” she said finally, and returned to her task. “And they endanger their neighbours, too, inviting these spirits.”
After a moment intent on tying a knot, she turned to Walter. “How are you sleeping, child?” And then, “Don’t you hear them at night, growling from the swamps?”
Walter felt uneasy. But he didn’t believe in ghosts. “What would the spirits want of me?” he asked. “Did something happen in the house?”
Celia snorted. “It’s not a ‘me’ thing,” she said. “It’s not personal. The elders know that the air is filled with all manner of ancient darkness. Did you know that more ten percent of the men enslaved here died within a year of getting off those ships?” She waved her skinny brown fingers to the north. “Just a mile from here were the rice fields. More than half of the children died working those wetlands. Malaria. And worse. They’re still rattling away, hoping to be heard. We forget, but they remember.”
Walter walked the old woman to her front porch, where she resumed her favourite perch in her rocking chair. “The haints chase us, begging us to listen, to our exhaustion,” she said. “They want to find a home, but our homes are not their homes. My advice? Listen to them. But don’t let them in.” And she snapped at the rolled up paper under his arm, so he gave it to her, and turned back to his own yard.
There were just a few of Beth’s empty wine bottles in the blue bin in the garage. But it was a start. He would head into town later and look for others. He found an old clothesline and cut it into pieces.
Walter was just finishing with what they had when Beth came into the front yard and asked him what he was doing.
“It looks nice, don’t you think?” he asked. He stepped back to admire the way the green glass bottles glowed in the rising sun.
Lorette C. Luzajic
Lorette C. Luzajic is a writer, editor, publisher, educator, and visual artist in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been widely published, nominated, taught in workshops, and translated into Spanish, Urdu, and Arabic. Two of her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and another is forthcoming in Best Microfiction. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw.