Eddie Is Here

Copyright 2003
Dan Summerfield

The wife was watching Jeopardy as I read the newspaper that evening. I
recall lowering the paper to look at the television as Trbek provided
an interesting answer. Several feet above and to the right of the TV
was what appeared to be a tiny, bright blue sphere.

Thinking it must be a reflection off my glasses, I moved my head
slightly. The sphere disappeared. But when I moved my head back into
the former position the sphere didn't reappear. That's odd, I
thought.

Later, while reading in bed, I saw it again, hanging in the air over a
dresser.This time I wasn't wearing glasses. I blinked and it was gone.
Weird, I thought. Perhaps it was time for an eye check.

The next morning I was pounding away at the typewriter on the kitchen
table, hoping to finish a screenplay. When checked the time the kitchen
clock read 11:11. Noticing the pendulum had stopped I walked over and
flicked it into motion.

Hoping to finish one more scene before breaking for lunch, I typed
steadily for what must have been another 20 minutes before turning
again to check the time. The clock now read 11:15. The pendulum had
stopped again.

Checking the actual time on a digital clock in the living room, I
reset the windup to 12:46, flicked the pendulum, and fixed myself a
sandwich. When I returned to the kitchen to start writing, the pendulum
was motionless. Damn it, I thought, I must have forgotten to wind
it.

Grabbing the key from the top of the clock, I inserted it into the
right side insert and began winding. Every completed turn would allow
the clock to run one full day. 31 turns was the maximum. After that the
clock could be wound no further.

The mechanism took the full 31 turns. Inserting the key in the
left-hand slot, I began winding the chime mechanism. 11 turns later the
key came to a dead stop.

What in the hell was going on? It was obvious that at least the chime
mechanism had been wound on the first of the month, but in all the
years we had the clock I always wound the clock mechanism first, then
the chime.

Somehow the clock mechanism had run down completely in only 11 days,
but the chime mechanism had not. Giving up writing for the rest of the
day, I picked up the manuscript and headed for the living room to do
some editing. I could hear the clock chiming the hour and half hour
from my seat on the sofa.

Three days went by. The clock kept working and the blue sphere never
reappeared. One odd thing did happen, but when my wife told me about it
I just shrugged it off as an eccentricity of one of our dogs.

Scooter was her name. The wife had gotten up at two in the morning to
let Scooter and our other dog, Buffy, outside to relieve themselves.
Buffy was asleep in her usual living room spot but Scooter was nowhere
to be found. The wife searched every room on the first floor. No
Scooter. Hearing a noise, she checked the upstairs where there was an
unfurnished bedroom and an attic room we used for storage. She found
Scooter sniffing at the door to the attic room.

The strange part was Scooter had never been upstairs. Suffering from a
mild form of hip displasia, she could not normally have climbed the
steep staircase. In fact, to get to the kitchen from the back door one
had to walk up five steps. Scooter could walk down those steps, but not
up. I had to carry her up, which she became so accustomed to she would
stand patiently at the bottom of the staircase waiting for me to come
down and lift her.

Why then would she have walked up fifteen steps in the dark to nose
around a storage room in a part of the house she had never been
in?

Three days after the clock incident I took a short afternoon break to
read the weekly local newspaper. Tabloid sized, the only thing in it of
real importance were the township minutes, which are required by law to
be published.

But on this day I found myself going back through the paper again and
again, as if I were looking for some specific, but unknown, item. Three
quarters of an hour later I was still flipping through the pages when I
noticed the obituary of someone I had known.

Eddie, a friendly black man who had retained the heavy southern accent
of his native Mississippi, worked for the local apple grower who owned
the 40-acre orchard across the street from our farmhouse. When the
grower decided cut down all the trees in the orchard and replant with
miniatures, I approached Eddie to see if the grower would be willing to
sell me several rows of trees, which I would then cut down and split
for firewood. Eddie said he would get back to me. Several days later he
did.

I could, he told me, have four rows of the trees at a hundred dollars
a row. Since he was acting as an agent for the grower, I paid him on
the spot. Before leaving, Eddie warned me the trees would have to be
cut down before next spring because that was when the grower would be
replanting. I assured him that would be no problem.

In mid-February, I threw the chainsaw and a can of gas in the trunk
and headed for the farthest row of the trees we had purchased. A pickup
truck was parked just beyond the row. Two men were busy with chainsaws
on what I took to be rows they had purchased. As soon as I pulled the
chainsaw from the trunk one of the men walked over, stated that the
grower had given him permission to cut all the trees and told me to
leave. When I refused, he pulled a hatchet from the pickup and started
toward me. I left.

Calling the grower, I explained the situation. When I mentioned paying
Eddie the four hundred dollars there was a long pause. "So that's where
he got the money," he finally said.

Eddie was now in a coma and hospitalized, the grower told me. An
alcoholic, which I had not known, Eddie spent the money on several
cases of booze, which he drank so much of so quickly that he probably
would not revive from the coma.

That had been in January. Now it was June and Eddie was dead. He had
died on the 11th.

The obituary notice had a few details on Eddie's life. Slouched on a
kitchen chair, I read it carefully. Suddenly I bolted to an upright
position. My God, I thought, could this be the answer to some of the
strange things happening?

One line of the obituary read, "People will remember Eddie as he drove
through town waving from his blue tractor." A blue tractor? The blue
sphere? Just a coincidence? An obituary and what might simply have been
an optical illusion? I sat back to think.

I've always thought of death as the ending of a movie; a simple fade
to black, and you don't have to sit through the credits. But was it
possible that Eddie's spirit, or whatever, was in this house? I knew
next to nothing about spirits or ghosts, but had a casual
acquaintanceship with someone who did.

She had written books on the supernatural. Though we had never met in
person, we both wrote reviews for the metro newspaper's Sunday books
section. After one especially well written review, I called her to
compliment the piece. She returned the compliment, telling me she had
enjoyed many of my reviews. After chatting a while, we both hung up and
hadn't spoken since.

Now I looked her up in the phone book. Explaining the situation, I
outlined the obituary and blue sphere, the stopping of the clock, and
the dog's strange behavior. When I was through, she said it appeared
that I had achieved a breakthrough.

Someone from the spirit world was trying to reach me and these strange
happenings were meant to capture my attention. No harm could come from
it, she assured me, and somehow a message would get through.

"How do I communicate?" I asked.

"I can't tell you that," she replied. "But believe me, you'll find a
way."

Following our conversation, I sat back to think. How in the world,
especially in this world, does one communicate with a spirit
being?

I wandered into the living room and sat on the couch. Buffy, the Lab
mix, immediately arose from her spot near the open guests' bedroom door
and plopped down at my feet. Bending over to give her a pat, my eye
caught an item on the shelf of a small decorative cart in the corner. A
boxed Scrabble set. An idea took hold.

Grabbing the set. I mixed the tiles thoroughly and set the box at my
side on the couch. Without looking, I grabbed the first tile and laid
it on the coffee table. A dozen picks later I studied the line of tiles
carefully.

Gobbledegook! If someone was trying to reach me it wasn't by using
English or any other earthly language. Again I mixed the tiles
thoroughly. This time the letters picked were different but the result
the same; unintelligible garbage. One more try before the wife came
home, then I would put the set away.

Turning the tiles over so there would be no chance seeing the letters,
I mixed them carefully but thoroughly. And just to make sure my
subconscious didn't remember the positions of certain tiles, I covered
my eyes..

As my finger touched the first tile Buffy sat up, growling. Uncovering
my eyes, I saw her staring intently at the guests' bedroom door. I
stroked her head as a reassurance, covered my eyes again and reached
for a tile. The instant my fingers touched a tile Buffy gave a short
bark. Then a sudden chill came over me. Grabbing the tile, I opened my
eyes and saw the hairs on my arms standing straight up. I placed the
tile on the table. It was an H.
Six tiles later I was staring at a row of letters that read H W M C H
I O. Not as garbagey as the first two draws, but it still made no
sense. I tried pronouncing the letters as a word. Nothing. Then,
recalling Eddie's Mississippi accent, I realized he wouldn't pronounce
words the way I did. Placing another tile down, I studied the row
carefully, imagining how Eddie might pronounce it if these did
represent a word or words.

And then I had it! Eddie was trying to reach me and I knew exactly
what he wanted. That last tile had let me know what the message was. I
raced for the telephone.

The expert on the supernatural was congratulating me for deciphering
the message when the wife walked in the door. She quickly caught the
drift of the conversation, gave me one of those "You've got too much
time on your hands" looks, and walked to the bedroom to change.

After hanging up the phone, I followed. I had previously told her
about seeing the blue sphere and the problem with the clock. Now I told
her about Eddie and his death, and my conversations with the expert. I
showed her the Scrabble tiles, still in their row on the coffee
table.

That last tile, drawn blindly, had been a U, which now made the row
read:

H W M C H I O U.

In Eddie's always slightly slurred southern accent it could be read
as:

How Much I O U?

I told her that if it was Eddie causing all these strange things to
happen, it was because he felt enormous guilt over the four hundred
dollars he had cheated us out of. He couldn't or wouldn't move on to
wherever souls go. She laughed at my interpretation of the letters,
which was interesting because as a born again Christian she believed in
an afterlife; as a fugitive from Catholicism I did not.

The wife went to bed early that night, saying she had some kind of
skin rash that was making her physically ill. I stayed up late trying
to figure a way to communicate with Eddie, Finally deciding to write a
simple note and put it somewhere the wife wouldn't find it. When
finished, I folded the note, hid it on the top of a tall china cabinet
and went to bed.

When I awoke the next morning I lay in bed thinking of nothing. It
takes minutes for the thought processes to start. When they did the
first thought was of Eddie.

"Well, he's gone," were the words that came to mind.

That thought was followed immediately by a second.

"Okay, just how do you know that?"

Just how did I know he was gone? The answer came. In an instant I was
on my feet, pulling on clothes. It was time for one last phone call to
the expert, followed by a meeting with the wife.

That evening we sat on the couch for a heart-to-heart. I summarized
events up until the time she went to bed the evening before.

"Do you know that when I came to bed you were sleeping on your stomach
on my side?" I asked. She always slept on her back, and never on my
side of the bed. Her answer was it might have happened because of some
medication she was taking for the skin rash.

"Do you recall what you said after you moved over to your side of the
bed?" She had moved over to her side of the bed, lay quietly for a few
minutes as if in a deep sleep and then spoke to me. Now she remembered
saying something, but not exactly what.

"You said, 'Thank you for helping me.' And when I asked how I had
helped you, you seemed to wake up, and you said 'I don't know.'" She
had seemed startled out of the deep sleep with her response, then went
right back into the deep sleep. Now she was puzzling over her
words.

"It was," she said, "as though someone was making me say, 'Thank you
for helping me.' She paused. "As though they were speaking to you
through me."

It appeared my message had gotten through to Eddie. Exactly how I do
not know. Was it the act of writing my forgiveness down on paper, or
was just the thought of forgiveness sufficient?

Whichever, it is worth repeating.

"You owe me nothing, dear Eddie. Go in peace and love, my friend."