Skin

I can’t touch the silver bell anymore. Every time my fingers touch it, it feels charged. There’s an energy that runs through it, and when my hands hold it, there’s almost like a shock that runs up through my arms. Sometimes I will pick it up and see how long I can hold it, before having to drop it from discomfort. Now it sits in front of me on the table, it’s once shiny silver body now tarnished from lack of cleaning. I used to rub it, before the thrum in my fingertips became too strong. I’m not able to clean it anymore.

This bell is older than both my father and me. It belonged to my great grandfather. He was a milk man in Dallas in the 1920s. His name was James Weaver. He would wake up before sunrise and deliver dewy bottles of milk to families on his route, picking up their empty bottles from the past days. James would ring this bell to alert those inside, in the warm safety of their homes, that the milk was on their doorstep. It was a simple job. It supplemented their day to day money, living in a small apartment in the Deep Ellum district, where my great grandmother, Anita, would take care of their daughters. Soon he got a job working for the city putting in a gas line. Anita was a stay at home mother.

Things were easy; life was easy. James and Anita were happy. Until, Anita went home to Oklahoma to see her father, Henry Rainwater. She took a trip in March of 1930. My grandmother, Jimmie, was 3 years old and went with her. I’m not sure why Anita didn’t take her other daughter, Juanita, but she just didn’t. James was home with her until Anita and Jimmie returned from their trip, 2 weeks later, when Anita took the silver milk bell and beat him over the head with it until he was dead. Then she took the girls to Hopewell, Virginia. It’s a speck on the map, a nowhere town buried deep in the Appalachian woods. They lived there until Anita was discovered by the police and arrested. The daughters were taken into foster care in Petersburg, eventually being split up.

There’s a mosquito buzzing around my head. I swat at it, but it continues its relentless attack. I decide to stand up, grabbing my coffee mug and opening the screen door. On the patio of the house there is a small chair and 3 legged table. June bugs blanket the old wood boards under my feet, and I have to make a sweeping motion with the palm of my foot to knock them out of the way of my path. I grab the bug spray sitting on the table and spray myself head to toe, hoping it will keep the mosquitoes away. It felt better to sit outside and stare out into the woods than to sit in the dark house. The sun was beginning to rise, and I thought I heard faintly through the trees stacked thickly in front of me the far off ringing of a bell. I peered through the dense trees, looking for what, I don’t know. An answer to a question I’m not even sure of.

I had been in Hopewell for a few days now. I had come here to find out what happened to Juanita and Jimmie after Anita was arrested. Obviously I have some answers. I wouldn’t be here without Jimmie, my grandmother, who grew up in Petersburg with her adoptive family, but returned to Hopewell once she was 18. There wasn’t much information on her adoptive family that I could find so far. She stayed here until she was 25, the age I am now, before suddenly leaving in the middle of the night, pregnant, and running to New Orleans. Jimmie gave birth to my father, Ricky James, named in part for her father. She married a man in the Navy, named Teddy, who was there on leave, and they had a second child after my father, named Teddy Jr., who unfortunately died from SIDS a few months after he was born. Teddy Sr. adopted my father as his own, and they moved to the small town of Minneola, Texas. This is where they spent the rest of their days until both of their deaths, which happened to be a day apart.

The reason I’m here is not just because of family history. It is because of something I was told as a small child by Jimmie. I used to go and spend the summers with her and Grandpa T, as he went by with me, and we would go fishing and hunting and boating. They taught me how to hold and shoot a shot gun, and I remember how soar my shoulder would be. I remember when alligators suddenly appeared in the lake behind their house, sending small town curiosity and fear abound in Minneola because they had never been that far west in Texas. I remember sitting out on their back porch, listening to CMT radio and sipping sweet tea while Jimmie drank whiskey sours and Grandpa T grilled up venison he had shot on a hunting trip. As a little girl, Grandpa T would never let me go on hunting trips with him. He wouldn’t allow me to do anything unless I was with him; I wouldn’t be allowed on certain lakes with him or to leave the few acres of land that their house sat on, unless it was to visit the trailer up the hill where another little girl a few years older than me lived.

Jimmie was different though. She would take me on little trips while Grandpa T was in town shopping or on a longer fishing trip. We would go to far off valleys we had to ride 4 wheelers out to through dense woods. We would pick flowers and have picnics and she would let me swim in the creeks. Not all creeks, especially if they were known to have regular water moccasin sightings, but most. We would make mud dolls out of creek mud, use blackberries that grew along the water to dye the dried vessels, popping a few in our mouths between squishing them along the cracking figurines. She used to tell me that indigenous tribes who were feuding would kidnap the other tribes women and use these blackberries to mark them as their own. They would cut under their eyes and squish the blackberries into the wound to dye their skin. Then they were marked forever, as taken women, as slaves. She would lean in real close and tell me to never let a man mark me.

One night Jimmie woke me up. I was groggy, rubbing my sleep filled eyes and asking what was going on. She pulled me from bed, helped me put my sneakers on, and pulled me out into the woods in my sleep shorts and oversized shirt. She had a flashlight in her other hand and led me down a path through the woods I’d never noticed before. Everything past 5 feet surrounding us disappeared in darkness between the tall widow-maker trees. In my memory they looked like skeletons surrounded by a black sea of nothingness as I was led deeper into the pitch black. We finally came to a small clearing where a tent had been put up. Jimmie dragged me inside and we sat cross-legged facing each other. There were 2 lanterns sitting in adjacent corners, lighting the inside of the tent. A plaid blanket I recognized from their living room was laid across the floor, cushioning us against the pine needles and hard earth under the fabric of the tent. Between us sat a book. It was Jimmie’s diary. She wrote in it before bed as we sat in front of the television each night, every once in a while looking up to smile slightly at whatever show Grandpa T had put on.

“Now listen here, because we don’t have much time,” she had whispered, hurriedly adjusting herself across from me in the tent. “I need to share something with you that is very important.”

“What are we doing out here, Grandma? What time is it?” I was confused and also still sleep muddled, my 13 year old self not pleased to be dragged from my bed.

“Well if you shush I will tell you.” Jimmie seemed exasperated. She placed her fingers on top of the diary, her long, deep red nails that never seemed to break looking like knives across the leather surface.

When Jimmie spoke you listened. She was usually light-hearted, loud with joviality and laughter. But there were times where she would be so serious, her stare could cut right through you. When she was like this there would be hell to pay if not taken seriously. I had not seen her like this that often. There were moments growing up as a kid where we would be up late and she would excuse herself to the porch to smoke a cigarette and just stare out into the woods. It would be so dark you could only see the ember as it hung between her fingers or her lips. She would sit out there once she was finished smoking, sometimes for over an hour, just sitting in the dark staring off. It always seemed to me like she was waiting for something.

“Lou, I need you to pay very close attention to me right now. I’m going to give you some instructions that you will need one day.” Jimmie started flipping through her diary, stopping at pages to show me their bent corners. “I’ve bookmarked specific pages for you to read. These will explain things more in-depth for you later. Don’t open this book tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day. You will open it when it’s ready to be opened.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I huffed, peering up at her. Her usually manicured brown curls were a mess from her running her hands through it anxiously. She was rarely ever unsure about anything, it was unsettling to see her like this.

Jimmie ignored me and kept talking. “Now, I’m going to tell you something that is going to scare you. You must be strong, sweet girl, as strong as I know you are and can be. This is going to test you. I so wish I had been strong enough myself to take care of it so that you wouldn’t have to.” She began crying, thick tear marks carving down her face as her eyes pierced into mine. The hair on my arms began to rise, goosebumps covering my body. My heart pounded away in my tiny ribcage.

“You’re scaring me, alright,” I murmured, holding myself. “Can we go back inside, I don’t like this, I don’t like what you’re saying. It doesn’t make sense Grandma.”

“You need to be scared right now. You need to understand why this is so important.” She leaned back a little and heaved a deep breath. Reaching behind her she grabbed a roll of brown parchment paper, scissors, and tape. Unrolling the parchment paper, Jimmie placed the book in the center and cut off enough to wrap it, taping the paper around the diary.

“Keep my diary. Remember what I said, the bookmarked pages?” She waited for me to nod. “Good. Pay attention, then you can leave me and run back to bed.”

“Wait, aren’t you coming with me?!” My words were frantic, but she put a finger to her lips and I quieted.

“Lou, when you grow up something will start following you. It will know where you are wherever you go. It will listen to your voice. It will smell your blood. No matter how many locks you put on your door, it will find a way inside.”

I was crying now. My body was shaking, my arms barely holding me in place.

“It always comes at different times. It came differently to my mama, Anita. It watched my sister, Juanita. It already had her at birth. She had a different fate because I took care of her, and I regret it every day. It’s now here for me. I wish I could have handled things differently, but I was selfish. I wish I could be strong enough for the aftermath. I wish I could learn and teach you from it. But I’m too old for that now, and I don’t deserve an after.”

Jimmie paused, hanging her head to compose herself while she silently cried. I reached over and grabbed her hands on the wrapped diary, her fingers curling around my small palms.

“Please don’t say that.” My voice was but a whisper.

“You’ve always been so sweet, darling. I hope you hold onto that.” Jimmie wiped her eyes and smiled weakly at me. “Before I send you back up to the house I need to tell you one more thing. Even though it is here for me, it won’t immediately start following you. It will be watching, but it does wait. I’m not sure why. We all have different timelines, I suppose. More importantly, you will know when it starts following you. It may be a dream, a feeling of being watched every day, a tingling. Whenever something peculiar begins to happen, something that doesn’t make sense, that’s when you’ll know. As this becomes more frequent it will be getting closer.”

She let go of my hands and picked up her diary. Her eyes were focused on the brown parchment, as if she could see through it to the writing beneath. After a few seconds she looked back up at me, resolutely placing the package in my hands.

“When it starts, open this book and read the bookmarked pages. My writing will help you to understand. I hope you will be a better woman than I and figure out some way to fix all of this.” She leaned in and dragged me into a tight hug, squeezing me so tight I couldn’t breathe. As she let me go she grabbed the flashlight we had used to navigate through the dark and pushed it into my hands. “Now go.”

As I ran back up the path through the grass and trees I was too afraid to turn around and look at the tent as I left it in the dark. I was terrified of seeing something lurking in the trees, claws outstretched, trying to gobble me up. I wanted to scream but my throat felt like it was closing. This was the most fear I had ever experienced and it would stay that moment, burned into my memory so clearly. Everything was as vivid as if it had happened yesterday, now 12 years later. I was too afraid to wake Grandpa T; Instead I ran to my room and lay awake until dawn, clutching Jimmie’s diary.

She never came back to the house. After a few hours of her being gone that morning Grandpa T began to worry. He asked me if I had seen her, I told him I hadn’t that morning, but the previous evening she had taken me out to the woods where she had set up a tent. He went looking for her. When he came home the police were called. Grandpa T wouldn’t tell me what he had found. He just slumped in his chair, silent. Silent for the rest of the day, unless answering the police’s questions. I told them everything I knew, how she had brought me out to her tent, but not all that she had said. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to keep that a secret. It was between us, and even as a child I knew that it was just for me and no one else. What she had told me, and the diary. It wasn’t until my parents came that I found out what had happened to her.

The tent had been discovered in tact. The lanterns were still on inside, a slight glow in the early morning light, as Grandpa T had described it to the police. As he got closer, though, there was a menacing air. Something was not right here, he felt. He was right. Unzipping the tent, he discovered Jimmie inside, laying spread eagle in the center of the tent, her throat slit. The knife that did it lay next to her on the ground.

The day after Jimmie’s death, Grandpa T passed away. My parents had come from our home out of town to be here with us. Jimmie was my father’s mother; this was a time of grief for him as well. Dad was here for his stepfather, Grandpa T, and also to figure out what had happened to his late mother. It was supposed to be a time of pain, but of union. The next morning, however, we found Grandpa T sitting out on the back porch with his shot gun as if waiting. There was no movement. He was so still. When my dad had approached him he thought he was simply asleep. When Dad grabbed his shoulder the gun fell to the floor, letting out a loud clatter and startling us inside. Grandpa T had sat out on the porch all night, waiting just like Jimmie used to do, and he was just…gone.

It was strange to see at such a young age death in such frequency. One of a broken heart, the other, well that was thought of as a closed case. There was much speculation in the coming months of what had happened to Jimmie to make her do what she did, but never an answer. It was a clean cut, the slice that took her life. Most believed it was a suicide. Some spun tales of a killer in the woods. In my heart of hearts I wanted to believe she had not killed herself, but I knew otherwise. People whispered about her having a mental break. This was all small town gossip. It was something else that had pushed her to do what she had done, but what that something was I couldn’t understand.

As I grew older I felt horrible guilt over hiding the diary. What if me refusing to open this diary had been wrong? What if she had written about her mental health and it had actually been a suicidal break she had? What if her words in this wrapped book had been able to solve the mystery surrounding her death? Though the frantic thoughts that plagued me inspired painful harassment on my own psyche, I knew that I was right to not open it. She had told me I would know when it was time to read the pages. When it was time to know what had happened. When I would learn what would be following me, too.

The thought of what would eventually catch up to me like it had to Jimmie kept me up many nights. Therapy on a weekly basis was a norm for a while. I thought I was insane for believing her and had many times almost torn open the parchment wrapped diary to read those bookmarked pages. Yet, something had always stopped me. I waited. I waited. I waited. And one day, I understood. It was just like she had told me all those years ago.

‘You will know when it starts following you. It may be a dream, a feeling of being watched every day, a tingling. Whenever something peculiar begins to happen, something that doesn’t make sense, that’s when you’ll know…’

James’ silver milkman bell began to ring.

It started about a year ago. I was visiting home from living in Los Angeles. My dad was getting sick and I was visiting frequently at that point. My mom needed help cleaning out some boxes in the garage. Dad liked to hoard and she was quietly fazing out a lot of the things he had held onto. I was digging through some dusty, rat gnawed records when I heard a bell ring. I had stopped for a moment, listening, thinking it might just have been a noise I mistook coming from the television inside. Then I heard it again. I asked, but Mom didn’t hear it. I shrugged it off.

That was until it rang a third time.

I followed to where the noise had come from, waiting for the ring to guide me. Another ring led me under the work table, digging a box out of the corner. It was covered in dust and rat droppings. The writing on the side said ‘MOM’S STUFF’ in my dad’s handwriting. I used a box cutter to open it, finding old family photos, whiskey glasses, books and some collected cloth. At the bottom I found a hard object wrapped in lace. As my fingertips touched it, even through gloves and it’s wrapping, they tingled. I pulled the old lace away to discover a silver bell. I held it by the handle and went to ring it myself. It made no noise. I upended it in my hand and discovered there was no hammer inside. A sinking feeling grew inside me. Jimmie’s words seeped into my head like fog over a valley. I was remembering a nightmare I had worked very hard to conceal from myself.

When I presented it to my dad he told me it was his grandfather’s old milkman bell. His name had been James Weaver, Jimmie’s father, and he had been a milkman for a brief stint when they had moved to Dallas. The bell felt magnetic in my hands, but after a while it burned almost like touching dry ice. It was so strange and feral to me. I left it in my childhood bedroom before returning to LA.

When my father died six months later I returned home. I hadn’t heard the bell ring since my last visit. At home, staring at my father’s urn, I heard the ringing again. I followed it upstairs, to my old bedroom, and saw the bell. It had moved from where it had been originally sitting on my desk, now in the window. The ringing came again; the bell did not move. It was overwhelming, a moment of confusion and terror all wrapped up into one. Wanting to believe I was just hearing things, I went to the doctor. I was worried that my father’s death was affecting me, rationality like a blanket over the creeping fear of what might actually be happening. Unfortunately the doctor could not help me, recommending a hearing specialist and grief counseling, to which I both attended. The latter was helpful to a certain extent, the former yielding nothing more than a bill.

Many sleepless nights and ringing bells later, I returned to Texas. I was extremely unhappy with my life in Los Angeles and wanted to be in the same state as my mother, not to mention the ringing. It had picked up in frequency. It went from a few times every other month to once a month, to now every week. I contemplated what Jimmie had told me. It was time I read her diary.

I didn’t want to end up like Jimmie. I didn’t want to feel crazy. I wanted to try to see what Jimmie was saying without saying. I wanted to try to know what was coming for me.