Part two: An old lady

So we get to this tag sale, and there's about 40 people walking through and around makeshift rows of shit left by the person who lives in the filthiest-looking house I think I've ever seen... up to this point, anyway.

The yard, which I mistook for the Australian Outback, looked like it hadn't been mowed at any point during this century. There were bushes so unkempt I swore they were trees. The sidewalk in front of the house (and even the driveway) was crawling with those weeds that always seem to pop up from the cracks in the asphalt. The small patch of dirt in the front yard that was roped off and covered with seeds suggested to me that someone was trying to grow grass. However, this made no sense to me because if you're not going to maintain whatever grass you already have, why go to the trouble of trying to grow more?

The maroon-colored car parked at the top of the driveway (had to be a Datsun) may have had four tires but the one next to it camping out on the grass in the side yard (probably another Datsun) definitely did not. At best, it was probably riding on the brake rotors.

The brown-ish paint that colored the house was peeling and flaking in so many places. It kind of looked like any old painting that had been worn and weathered so much over time that the canvas was starting to peel off in strips. It was a small house too; one floor with only two windows in the front. As my Father had recalled, there was probably a good chance that someone had spotted a few Redcoats while looking out those windows two hundred years ago.

All around I saw what to me looked like junk. A couch, an old bookcase, a rusty table with four equally rusty chairs, picture frames, a lava lamp (if you can believe that). There were some old pottery pieces that had to be from the early 1900s. Nothing of too much interest to my mother. But in the end, it was the silver candlesticks that caught Mom's eyes. Not too much longer after we had gotten there, my mother spotted two antique-looking candlesticks. Mom was into that antique stuff. She liked the whole old-fashioned, rustic look about certain things. She was actually in the middle of a very intense examination of said candlesticks when the old woman walked over.

"You like them?" she asked. My mother was a bit easy to startle so the question made her jump a little. The old lady was short and walked slow with a cane. Her short, curly gray hair was a bit messy but the wire-frame glasses she wore helped to keep her bangs from attacking her eyes. Being so small, I quickly noticed her shoes. They reminded me of the kind you wear when you're in a hospital. And her dress resembled those smocks you used to wear in 5th grade art class. Those smocks sucked. I hated those friggen things.

"They're beautiful," Mom replied, breaking from her brief trance. "Are they old?"

"Let's just say I got them when I was about your age." She spoke very slowly, with a bit of a rasp. The kind of rasp that usually comes along after many years of smoking, but she didn't carry a cigarette in her hand. "Probably from The Cancer," my Dad said some time later. "The Cancer." As if there was only one.

"Well I imagine they were just as lovely the day you bought them," my mother politely insisted.

"Oh, I never paid for those, dear," the woman said. "They were a gift from my mother. Been in the family for quite some time now."

Mom was surprised. How could someone get rid of something that had been in their family for so long? Didn't people cherish items that had been handed down from loved ones anymore?

While this little interaction was going on, my father and I poked around at some other junk. Dad was basically trying to appear as if he was really looking around for something while I was busy trying to find out if there were any G.I. Joe's in this pile of garbage.

"There's no price on them, are they free?" Mom laughed as she asked this. Always the packrat, trying to snag a freebie. The old lady, however, who seemed pleasant from the beginning, did not find this funny.

"Oh, I must have missed those," the old lady said. She reached out slowly and took one of the candlesticks from my mother's hands and held it in her own. She stared at it for a few seconds as if waiting for the price to slap her in the face. But to my disappointment (and my father's), there was no magical force leaping at her face and slapping the old lady in the mug. Not on this day at least. Still, the thought of it materialized a humorous visualization in my head and I had to hold back the laughter.

"Give me three dollars and you can take 'em," the lady said after a while. Mom reached into her purse and pulled out a five dollar bill and handed it to the old woman. Again, my mother attempted to make nice with the lady.

"Take the whole five," my mother said with a smile, and the old lady, indifferent in response to this gesture, turned and slowly walked away. Perhaps toward wherever she was keeping the loot she made off this tag sale. Meanwhile, my mother turned with a what-did-I-do look on her face and motioned to my father to let him know "we're leaving now."

That was about all the time we spent at the old lady's tag sale. How odd, I thought, that she did not have an old man accompanying her at her home? In fact, I didn't see anyone there who looked like they were helping her sell her old junk. Maybe her husband passed away some time ago. The thought left my mind about as quickly as we made it to the interstate.

"That woman was really odd," Mom said as we were driving toward the on-ramp.

"How so?" Dad asked.

After a huge sigh, Mom began, "One moment, we're talking like we're old friends. The next, she's brushing me off after I gave her the five and said she can keep the 2 dollars' change."

"She's old," Dad said, in defense of the old woman. "Maybe she's bipolar."

"Whatever," Mom interjected. Seeoin
It was a long ride home on I-91 as I felt we had accomplished nothing (no G.I. Joe's, no video games), but my mother was happy with her candlesticks so I suppose one could say "mission accomplished." She had no idea how soon she'd be getting rid of them.

Part Three: continued...

It was late. VERY late. It was so late it wasn't even cool to stay up THIS late past your bedtime (for those 8-year olds who are reading this). My brother Matt and I were asleep in our bedroom. Our room was pretty much in the middle of the house while my oldest brother, Bernie, and our parents were down the hall at the end of the house. The living room was located at the opposite end, and that's where the coal stove was.

My father would always be the first to wake up. He'd wake around six in the morning and clean the ashes out of the stove and shovel in some more coal before everyone else woke for breakfast (the stove always burned out overnight and by morning, the house temperature would be considerably lower than it was the night before so Dad would get up early and get things heated up again).

Now, the details from here will be given exactly as they've been given to me (I thought about throwing a little polterguiest action in here to "scare" it up a bit. You know, maybe tell you that dishes started flying from the cupboards and my mom became possessed, but I decided to leave it as it is. I figure embelishement is only embelishment while the truth is much scarier).

My father woke up sometime after midnight. It was pitch black in the room and he could feel the intensity of the cold hovering above his nose. He was disturbed in his sleep by the sound of someone shoveling coal into the stove at the other end of the house. He turned and saw my mother sleeping peacefully and immediately thought it was one of my brothers. As his eyes grew a little more accustomed to the darkness, he could just make out his robe hanging from the closet door and climbed out of the bed. Another shovel-full of coal from the other end of the house and my father began to get angry. How dare one of his sons disobey him by shoveling coal into the stove during the night? Didn't they know it cost money to burn coal in that thing?? Dad threw on his robe and opened the bedroom door.

The hallway wasn't as dark as the bedroom. There was a nightlight in the bathroom that shone a path of light in my father's direction and also in the opposite direction toward the kitchen and living room. He hadn't heard another sound since he left the bedroom and thought that maybe he had just missed my brothers.

At the end of the hallway, he turned the corner into the living room only to find the coal stove burning brightly and throwing off an obscene amount of heat. The little door through which coal was fed into the stove was open and tiny sparks were being thrown out onto living room carpet. My father walked over to the stove and closed the little door, noticing that the shovel hadn't been put back in it's place. "Little shits must have heard me coming," Dad said to himself. He also noticed that with all the heat virtually consumed by the living room, the one place where it should have been fiercely hot, in front of the stove, was cold (My father swears to this day that he felt chilly standing in front of the stove).

After considering the chill he felt, he left the living room and checked his sons' bedrooms. Every one of us was sound asleep (or faking it, he thought briefly), and he went back to bed.

The following morning, at breakfast, my father asked all three of us if we had gone near the coal stove the night before. None of us ever woke up during the night, let alone fed coal into the stove. And neither did Mom.

Part Three: the first appearance

After a few months had gone by, and the dead of winter was now upon us, it was time for my father to fire up the coal stove and generate a little heat for us old-school New Englanders. The reason for the coal stove was that Dad never believed in electric heat because it was too expensive so he hired a service to come deliver loads of coal about 2-3 times throughout the season. It was effective enough, I suppose. Dirty, because one would have to shovel coal into the stove and afterwards, remove the ashes left by the coal that had already burned, but still effective. My father's only rule was this: "Nobody shovels coal into the stove but me. If you're cold at night, take out another blanket from the closet and put it on." Needless to say, we spent many a cold night at Chez Loubier. But none so cold as the nights spent during that winter.

My mother had placed the candlesticks she got from that tag sale on the mantel above the coal stove. Sometimes she'd take them down to burn a candle or two, but mainly they were put there for the "ambiance," as Mom liked to say. I really don't think the ambiance she got was the kind of ambiance she intended to achieve. I think it started one night in December of '84. And it scared the hell out of us.

Part one: "How much longer?"

It was really just an ordinary October day. The leaves were changing (some were already falling), the grass stopped growing for the year (some spots were already brown) and from the highway, as I watched from the backseat of my Dad's old Mercury Cougar, all the houses in the town below had wisps of smoke coming from the chimneys. To me, it looked like a bunch of candles had been blown out all at the same time.

The year was 1984, and on this day, I was tagging along with Ma and Pa Dukes (had no choice, I was 5 years old). Apparently, someone out in Greenfield, Massachusetts was foolish enough to have a tag sale (or a yard sale, or a rummage sale, depending on what part of this lovely country you're from) on this brisk Saturday morning in October. So naturally, it was my mother's job to drag her husband and youngest son an hour north up I-91 to pick through someone else's crap just in case there was something of value to her.

Mom was a bit of a talker as well. She'd chew my Dad's ear off the entire day and he would just turn his head and smile every now and then just to show her he was listening. Occasionally he would offer a confirming, "hmm," or "oh yeah?" but for the most part, he'd pretty much stare straight ahead and watch the road in front move toward him at a steady 55 mph clip. Someone once said my mother could talk a dog off of a meat wagon. I didn't understand what that meant (again, I was five).

From the backseat, in between battles with HE-Man and Skeletor, all I could offer was the frequent, "how much longer?" "Ten more minutes," my mother would say. Mom was infamous for replying with "ten more minutes." Ever notice how every time you asked your parents how much longer, it was always "ten more minutes?" It didn't really matter where you were going. You could have been 2 hours from the destination, but it didn't matter. I think every time I was told "ten more minutes" it had already been twenty minutes from the last time I'd asked. Maybe it was my own fault... or maybe I didn't understand the duration of a minute. All I knew was I was hungry. And where the hell was Greenfield anyway?

About ten minutes after we got off the highway, we arrived at the tag sale.

prelude to el sobrenatural

I can't remember how many times I've been told this story. I used to think it was to keep my brothers and I from staying up late at night after my parents went to bed so we could watch old Family Ties reruns or soft-core porn on HBO. But you know how you start to believe things after you've heard them spoken of so many times? Well, that's why I believe this story. That and the fact that I'm a grown man now and my parents still swear that the following events did indeed happen. After all, they never gave me a reason not to believe them. And I never gave them a reason to tell stories. None like this...