Poltergeists on President Street
The memory knocks insistently, rattles its chain. The story retold, summoned, shared like leftovers from a phantom feast. My uncle’s voice, an incantation that wiped the table clean of holiday food, poured the chill down the backs of our collars, goosefleshed our arms, as he explained how most ghosts are a disappearing act, but poltergeists engineer noisy return engagements. Vaudevillians of the void, greedy for a live audience.
A lifetime ago, his weekly poker game was dinner-theatre for restless spirits stuck in a haunted house. He carried in his gut hunger boxed inside the Great Depression, festering impatience, unquiet cravings. Nicotine nursed him daily, except when he donned altar-boy drag: cassock and surplice. The priest would elevate the host to an invisible God, his thurible filling the air with holy smoke. “Saints have no opportunity to stay dead,” he thought, cupping a fist to the flame, inhaling an unfiltered Lucky Strike behind the rectory as his eyes scanned his surroundings and a “Room for Rent” drifted into view.
Complaints had carved an abyss between himself and his parents. They were inhospitable to the stink of stogies and cigarettes that fueled rounds of poker, angling their eyes like a crucified Christ, imploring the card players to quit. He needed a new venue, and offering rent money was his ace.
He ran enthusiastically up the stoop as a wan housewife ghosted into view, her face wreathed by a French inhale. A deal was struck for two games during weeknights, eight in a month, paid in advance. From an inner sanctum, a room he could not see, an unearthly falsetto shrieked, dimming the sunshine, roaring into his ears. “We have ghosts,” she explained. “No extra charge.”
Now those long-ago scares rose like steam, in the same way a flayed turkey breast releases its heat to the carving knife. Then came not the rapping, tapping Poe heard on his chamber door but the crashing, smashing of crockery shelved in china cabinets, glassware thrown at the stove, forcing the players to their feet, hunting for the source of the commotion, only to find nothing. To my uncle’s eye, though, there were no cabinets—at least, not anymore. There had been, at one time, but the furious being continued smashing them, in their absence, decades later.
On other evenings, spooks would overturn the table, sending hearts and clubs airborne, alarming all. Haunting memories must have gnawed at the apparition’s loneliness, continuing a ferocious domestic drama, echoing long ago chaos.
Priests came and went, their blessings, novenas, incense, prayers brittle as glass. Nothing lived in these invocations: no exorcism, no catharsis.
Collectively, our blood forgets to surge and flow as we shiver on the brink of climax. My uncle’s closing act, ventriloquy, fills the room with unhinged cackling, a poltergeist maniacally gleeful. Proud of its performance as our soup pot boils dry and our percolator shrieks.
Years after, I dream of what must have happened to wind a spirit so angrily to that house: a slow-cooked rage, the soughing wind taunting the drawn shades, tattered scullery wallpaper scuffed by body slams. A furious spouse. Abuse accumulated, stoking a fire in the belly. Well-oiled revenge readying, seething, sharpening a six-inch boning knife. A marital ragout splattered across the wall. Now a dirge lullabies her ears as she swoons around the house, searching for a shovel, lozenging the word burial under her tongue. She begins her maniacal laughter.
Tomorrow’s empty jar of morning fills with men in white coats and a restraining garment nearly split open by wild whoops of merriment, freedom from her husband’s rage. At last there’s a sense of the future humming.
Except it would not end there. Emotions drowned in this bloody kitchen would resurface, be regurgitated. Have the last laugh.
