MAN WITH A CANVAS BAG
GARY A. BRAUNBECK
WHEN I WAS a little boy, there lived on our street—four houses down from my family, to be exact—a man who killed his five-year-old daughter. I can’t say “accidentally killed” because for all the years my family knew Earl and Patricia Spencer, Earl spoke of the event (when he spoke at all) as if Cathy’s death had been a premeditated act on his part, the culmination of some grand evil scheme, meticulously planned and skillfully executed. He spun the narrative of his crime with such deep conviction that anyone listening would almost believe he had deliberately taken her life. Earl needed to believe that we thought him guilty, so we pretended that we did, and that our forgiveness was implicit. It made the truth easier to live with when never a word of it was spoken. It was simpler for Earl to blame himself for Cathy’s death than it was for him to accept the probability that we live in a charnel-house universe where everything was, is, and always will be a random fuck-up, including the formation of certain dyssymmetrical protein molecules that arbitrarily gave way to the double helix and—voilà!—humankind doing its endless happy dance across the face of this planet.
I was nine years old on the morning Cathy Spencer was killed. American troops were still in Vietnam. Richard Nixon was still president. It was the twenty-ninth of October and every house on either side of North Tenth Street had two things in common: Halloween jack-o’-lanterns, and autumn leaves raked into neat piles at the curb, or at the foot of driveways, or the base of trees. The air was rich with the afterscents of neighbors’ burned leaves from the night before (you were still allowed to burn leaves back then, and, God, how I miss that smell being part of the world). The Kid-Countdown-to-Beggars’-Night clock was ticking so loudly it was all anyone under the age of twelve could hear or wanted to think about.
I was raking leaves in our front yard. I loved raking leaves into a great big pile because then I could take a good running jump into that pile, watch the explosion of autumn colors, and hear that unmistakable dry, scratching whisper only autumn leaves can make as the wind pushes them across a cold sidewalk. Sometimes I’d hide in the pile when I saw one of my friends approaching and then jump out with a monster scream just as they reached our driveway. One of the greatest joys of childhood is that earsplitting shriek of terror made by your friends when you’ve successfully scared the living shit out of them.
“Hey, Tommy!” shouted Cathy Spencer jumping up and down and waving her arms like she was trying to signal an airplane. She was dressed in her Wilhemina W. Witchiepoo costume, her favorite character from the H.R. Pufnstuf television show. I was an Orson Vulture fan, myself, but only my parents and Cathy knew that.
I waved back at her. “You aren’t wearing your nose.”
She giggled and rolled her eyes. “Dummy.”
“Well, you aren’t wearing it. But, hey, it looks real good anyway.”
Cathy smiled at me and pointed to my ever-growing leaf pile, then to the one at the foot of her parents’ driveway. “Lotsa leaves, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I still go trick-treating with you?” Her eyes got really wide when she asked this, like I was going to say no. I’d taken her trick-or-treating for the last three years. She was fun to be with on Halloween.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You did forget to put on your nose.”
She stuck out her tongue and giggled.
“We’ll have the best costumes, you and me.”
“Uh-huh. Thank you, Tommy.”
“You’re welcome.”
“There’s lotsa leaves.” She scooped up a handful and buried her face in them, taking a deep smell. “Pretty.” She dropped the leaves, smiled again, then waved as she made her way back toward her front porch. I turned my attention back to the project at hand and doubled my raking speed. I couldn’t stop smiling. Cathy had that effect on you. She was sweet, courteous, a little sneaky when she put her mind to it, and everyone’s friend. Cathy was also retarded. Back then, it wasn’t called Down syndrome, a person wasn’t “developmentally disabled,” and the term “special needs,” as it’s known in its current context, didn’t even exist. A person like Cathy was retarded, period. It wasn’t a contemptuous term—no, for that, you pulled out that old chestnut “mongoloid,” a word no one in the neighborhood ever used or allowed anyone to use. Though she was five then—almost six, she’d remind you when given the opportunity—Cathy would always be three years old. And like any three-year-old, Cathy could be, as my mom put it, “a little stinker.”
When I looked back, Earl Spencer was trotting out the front door, lunch pail in one hand, keys to the bus in the other. Earl’s “bus” was actually an extra-large passenger van that held a maximum of twelve people. He drove a route that took him from one end of Granville Street to the other, then into downtown Cedar Hill, where he made a circle around the square before heading back. The Cedar Hill City Council contracted with Earl and three other drivers (each of whom owned his own “bus”) to cover the entire city, and while there was decent enough business to keep all four drivers busy year-round, the last two and a half months of every year were a particularly busy time—lots of people doing early Thanksgiving shopping, early Christmas shopping, or making last-minute Halloween candy and decoration runs.
Earl gave me a quick wave as he rounded the front of the bus and climbed in, firing up the engine. Looking at my trusty Superman watch, I realized that he was running about fifteen minutes late. He put the bus in gear, honked his horn as he waved good-bye to Patricia, and backed out of the driveway. Then the pile of leaves at the foot of the Spencers’ driveway moved.
Lotsa leaves.
To this day I can’t tell you how I knew it was Cathy and not the autumn wind.
“… a little stinker.”
I just knew, period.
I threw down the rake and ran toward the bus as fast as I could, screaming for Mr. Spencer to stop, Stop Stop STOP!, but he either didn’t hear me or didn’t realize what had happened until he looked in the rearview mirror and saw me standing in the middle of the street, my pants soaked in Cathy’s blood because I’d slipped in the heavy wet streaks left by the tires.
I remember the loud pop! as the bus backed over the leaves and into the street (he’d run over her head right away, but I didn’t know that yet). I remember seeing the great, wide splash of bright red spit up from inside the leaves and spatter the back side of the suddenly too-white bus (and running over her head first, that was a blessing in disguise, wasn’t it?). I remember looking down and seeing one of Cathy’s arms shudder (involuntary muscle reaction, but at the time I thought she was still alive). I remember looking up and seeing her other arm being dragged by the rear bumper (that proved she was still alive, because she’d grabbed the bumper as if she really were Wilhemina W. Witchiepoo and could stop the bus just by touching it). I slipped in the blood, scrambled to my feet, screamed at Mr. Spencer again—“She’s hurt real bad! She’s hurt real bad!”—and then spun around, dropped to my knees, and began pulling Cathy from the now soaked and half-crushed pile of leaves.
I was later told that it took three people to get my arms loose from her body. I was later told that I tried to put her head back together using the bits of skull and pieces of brain that I could find, and then clumps of bloody leaves and small broken twigs when there was no more skull or brains to be found. I was later told that Earl Spencer stood frozen at the back of his van, howling like a wounded animal. I was told all of these things by my parents, and so I never questioned whether or not they were true.
Since I was the sole witness to what happened, the police talked to me first. I remember that Mom knelt beside me the entire time, holding my hand in hers. I told the police everything that I’d seen, up to the moment I started digging Cathy out of the leaves; from there, I had no concrete memory of events.
“He’s in shock,” said one of the officers. “We’d better get him to the hospital.”
I pointed to the middle of the street.
“What’s he doing?” Both Mom and the officer looked, and saw nothing.
“But he’s right there,” I said. “See? That man with the bag?”
Mom shook her head and put her arm around my shoulder. “Hon, there’s no man with a bag in the street.”
“Okay,” said the officer. “He’s seeing things. We take him to the hospital now.”
I turned around, feeling dizzy, and bumped into the gurney carrying the slick black bag that held what was left of Cathy’s body. My elbow bumped into it as I stumbled back, and something inside the bag made a thick, wet, slopping sound; it moved just like the pile of leaves. I imagined Cathy’s hand inside, trying to find the zipper and open the bag before she drowned in the leakage from her own broken pieces. I watched as her remains were loaded into the coroner’s wagon—what all of us kids used to call “the meat wagon,” a term that suddenly made me sick—and for some reason, I waved at her and whispered, “Good-bye, Witchiepoo.”
I waited for her hand to come out of the bag and wave back.
I still go trick-treating with you?
I guess she was all gone by then.
* * *
They gave me some kind of a shot at the hospital that made me feel all sleepy, so I don’t remember the drive home or Dad carrying me upstairs and putting me to bed. I came wide awake sometime around four in the morning, and for a few moments wasn’t sure where I was, but then I saw my shelf full of Aurora monster models and let out the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.
I got up, dressed, and put on my shoes. I saw that Mom had put a glass of water on my bedside table, which was good because I was really thirsty. Mom always thought of those things.
I finished the water and walked over to my bedroom window. My bedroom was at the front of the house, so I could see the street. I wanted to see the spot where Cathy had died, and I was going to sneak out if I had to. The street seemed a lot brighter than it usually did at night. I pulled back the curtain and saw the man with the canvas bag walking down the middle of the street. At every house he’d stop and kick through the leaf piles, looking for … I don’t know what.
But when he got to Cathy’s house, he put down his bag—that now glowed this bright kind of silver from deep inside—and began to sort through the leaf pile where Cathy had been hiding. I was surprised that one of our neighbors hadn’t gotten rid of that pile yet. I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that Earl and Pat would want to look at it again, not after this morning.
Then I realized that the leaf pile was gone; what the man with the canvas bag was sorting through were … well … the ghosts of the leaves, and they gave off a bright silver light. When he got to the inside of the pile, to where Cathy’s body had been, there was this soft blue light that was kind of shaped like a human body … only one that had been crushed and broken apart and killed.
I must have been really quiet when I went downstairs and unlocked the front door, because Mom, she was a really light sleeper, anything woke her up, but I got out of the house without waking her or Dad.
The closer I got to the man with the canvas bag, I saw that even Cathy’s blood left a kind of ghost behind; where the street had been slick and dark, there was now a smear of the same light blue that marked the spot where Cathy’s body had been. The man with the canvas bag was picking out very small things from the ghost blood, as well as from the gutters across the street. I looked closer, and I could see that there were these little blue pieces—and some that weren’t so little—scattered all over the street, even past the point where Mr. Spencer had stopped the bus.
“They never close off the areas for long enough,” said the man, still gathering ghost pieces. “They forget that the other cars that come through here afterward might catch the smallest bits in their tires and carry them—ah, here it is!” He held up something that looked like a jagged section of glass, and it was only as I walked closer that I saw it was a piece of skull, only blue.
“Yes,” he said to the question I hadn’t even asked yet, “even your blood and bones leave ghosts behind.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Finding the missing pieces?”
He stopped, grinned at me (his grin was kind of sad and scary), and said: “You catch on fast. I knew you were going to be trouble when you spotted me this morning.”
I began backing away. “I … I won’t tell anybody, I swear. I swear! P-please don’t hurt me.”
“Hurt you?” he said. “Why would I want to hurt the first person to see me in a while, let alone come over to talk to me?” He found another ghost piece, but I didn’t want to see what it was.
“Just so you know,” he said to me as he continued about his task, “Cathy didn’t feel much pain. I won’t lie to you, Tommy, she did have one moment of pain and pressure—kind of like when you’ve got a really bad stuffed-up nose and there’s a sneeze coming on and you feel the burst of pain rushing toward the front of your face and for a second or two that pressure is all you can think about. You ever have that feeling?”
I nodded. “When I had the flu last year. It hurt.”
“But was it a terrible hurt?”
I thought about it. “No, I guess not. Kinda like what you said.”
“That’s all the pain Cathy felt, just that and nothing more. Everything went bright and she was pulled away before the worst of it happened.” He stopped his task and looked at me. “She didn’t suffer, is what I’m saying. Do you understand?”
I could feel my throat getting all tight and the snot building up in my nose and my eyes starting to burn. I didn’t want to cry. “Yessir,” I said. “That’s good. She was really sweet. She was gonna go trick-or-treating with me. She was going to go as—” And that was all I got out before the tears and shakes overtook me. I felt so alone, so sad, so helpless and … responsible. I almost always watched to make sure Cathy went inside, but I had been too busy raking leaves that morning to bother. Maybe if I had, I would have seen her climb into the pile and cover herself up. Maybe if I had—
“Please don’t do that, Tommy,” said the man with a canvas bag. “I mean, go on and cry for the loss of your friend, of course, absolutely—I’d be surprised if you didn’t—but don’t you dare try and blame yourself for what happened.”
“… B-b-but if I’d’ve … if I’d’ve …”
“If you’d have what? Watched her climb into the pile, then you could have warned Mr. Spencer and none of it would have happened? What if you’d had to go to the bathroom before she got into the pile? Would you blame yourself because you were inside doing a Number One instead of out here keeping an eye on her? What if your mom had called you inside for some reason? You’ll ruin what’s left of your childhood with ‘What if …?’ Yes, I can tell some of what you’re thinking, not all of it, but the loudest parts. And right now your thoughts are pretty damned loud.”
I looked up at him and pulled in a deep breath. “I miss her so much already.”
“You should. She was a great little girl. Nothing wrong with missing someone you love.”
I started to say something in protest, but realized he was right. I’d loved her like she was my own little sister.
“And she knew that, Tommy. She knew that.”
I wiped my nose on my shirtsleeve, then wiped my eyes with my hands. “So, is there anything I can do to help?”
“Yes,” he said, walking toward me and opening his canvas bag. The silver light was really bright, and I wondered why it wasn’t causing people to wake up.
“Only people who can see me can see the ghostlights,” he said. “Stop worrying so much.”
I looked at the opened bag. “Do you want me to help you gather up more pieces? Or maybe take something out of there?”
He shook his head. “No. But isn’t there something you’d like to put in here?”
I stared at him. “I don’t have anything.”
“Yes, you do. And if you don’t put it in here, I can’t reassemble Cathy’s ghost, and if I can’t reassemble her ghost, well … no one will remember that she was ever here. Oh, sure, I mean you, your folks, her parents, people in this neighborhood, you’ll remember her for a while. But as the years go by and all of you grow older, the memories of her will start to dim, becoming less specific, less important, less necessary, until, at the last, everyone who was alive on this street on this day will die and forget to pass Cathy along to those left behind—those who never had a chance to see her smile, hear that goofy damn giggle, or catch her being sneaky around Christmas or her birthday.
“That may seem like an awful long time to you right now, Tommy, but trust me—it’s the blink of an eye. Part of my job is reassembling broken ghosts, but I also have to … I have to find the glue to use when putting them back together.”
“Like with my monster models?”
He considered this for a moment. “Not a bad simile, not bad at all. Yes, like with your monster models.”
“I could run back to the house and get my glue and put it in here. It’s real good glue, but you gotta watch out if you get it on your fingers, because then it dries kinda fast, and it’s smelly and sticky, and … and you don’t mean that kinda glue, do you?”
He grinned again. “You do not fail to surprise, I’ll give you that.”
I was sore, and thirsty, and tired, and I knew I was going to start crying again. I had no idea what he was talking about, only what he wasn’t talking about. I walked over to the pile of ghost leaves and looked down at the smoky-blue form that now lay where Cathy’s body had been. For a moment I was tempted to kneel down and touch it, only what if my hand went through? Or what if I lost my balance and fell in? Where would I be?
“Do you want to know why it is that my bag is so full and shines so brightly?”
“Yessir.”
He knelt beside me, both of us looking into the smoky-blue emptiness inside the ghost leaves.
“I have one of the hardest jobs of all the … well, I guess you’d call us janitors. It’s my job to gather up the missing pieces of the broken ghosts of children who died too soon. Cancer, starvation, abuse, neglect, terrible, terrible accidents like this morning. All of them always leave missing pieces behind. Sometimes—like with Cathy—there are more pieces than usual, but there’s always something missing. And I have to find it and then put everything back together so that these children will not be forgotten. That’s what ghosts really are, Tommy—our forgotten memories given eternal life outside of our minds and hearts. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
He pulled the bag closer to us. “The reason my bag is so full, Tommy, the reason it shines so very brightly, is because it is filled with the broken ghosts of children that I could not put back together. There are broken ghosts in here of children who died hundreds, even thousands of years ago. And I can never fix them, so they’ve been forgotten by everyone except me. Care to guess why I couldn’t fix them?”
The tears started coming again, but I was ready, and I managed to keep most of them back. “Because the people you asked for … for ‘glue,’ they said no?”
“That’s exactly right. And when they awoke the next morning, I was nothing more to them than some errant wisp of a dream that was forgotten before their feet even hit the floor. And the little ones whose broken ghosts were in my bag, they’re trapped in there forever. They don’t even have the comfort of knowing that they’re not alone. All any of them are aware of is their own isolation, their own loneliness, their own sadness. And each of them remembers the moment of their death in terrible, awful detail. Oh, I can relieve a little of their loneliness from time to time. I can open the bag and pick one and talk to them briefly, but it’s not enough. What they suffered during the last moments of their lives follows them even past death. And that stinks, Tommy. It stinks on ice.
“Is that what you want for Cathy?”
“Oh, God—no. I don’t want her to feel all lonely and forgotten. I don’t want her to feel like nobody loved her.”
“Then give me what I need—or, rather, give me the thing you need to put in here.”
“I don’t understand. I’m real sorry, but I don’t”
He looked into my eyes and did not blink. “If you could do it, would you die to bring her back? Did you love your friend that much? That you would give your life to have her back in the world?”
“I don’t wanna die! Please?”
“Most people don’t want to die, Tommy. I’m not asking you to die. I’m asking you if it were possible to bring her back by giving your own life, would you do it?”
“I—”
He held up a finger to silence me. “Before you answer, there’s something else you need to know. If you say yes, and you give me that, if you give me that willingness to offer up your life to have Cathy back in the world, you can never make that offer again. Believe it or not, Tommy, there comes a moment in everyone’s life when they get the chance to make that offer once, and have it accepted, without dying themselves. If you say yes and give me that so that I can put Cathy’s ghost back together, you can never make this deal again. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, you might have a wife, or a child of your own, who is very sick and on the brink of death, and you won’t be able to save them because you will have used your one ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. This is no small thing I’m asking of you.”
“Is this why so many people said no to you and left the broken ghosts in your bag?”
He nodded.
I looked at the smoky-blue form left in place of Cathy’s body. “Can I ask you something before I decide?”
“Of course.”
“Why does stuff like this have to happen? I mean, what you said, kids who get killed, who die of cancer or starve to death? How come anyone has to be hurt or sad or sick and lonely like that?”
“Look at me, Thomas Franklin Ireland.”
I did.
“I’m going to tell you something that I’ve told maybe, maybe four other people in all the thousands of years I’ve been on the job. Listen carefully.
“There is a reason for all of this. We are heading toward something so … so incredible, so beautiful, so indescribably wonderful that when it at last happens, everyone will look back at all of the savagery, all of the starvation, all of the brutality and disease and suffering and loneliness and fear and misery, and as one they will say: ‘It was worth it. To get here to achieve this wondrous thing … all of the pain and anguish suffered by every living thing since the beginning of time was worth it.’
“I can’t tell you what that thing is, Tommy, because I don’t know. I didn’t get that particular memo. I’m just the janitor.”
I wiped my eyes and inhaled a bunch of snot. “She was a really great little girl.”
“Yes, yes, she was.”
I stood up. “Yes.”
For a moment, he looked confused. “Do you mean …?”
“Yes. I would give my life to have her back.”
He held the bag toward me. “Then, please, drop it inside.”
I looked down and saw that both of my hands were clasped around something that looked like a bluish-silver leaf. I carefully moved my hands until they were over the bag and then let it go. It drifted down as if caught in a gentle breeze, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and I felt—though I didn’t have the emotional vocabulary to articulate it at the time—I felt something of sadness lifted from my eyes.
“I’ll remember her,” I said. “I’ll make sure everyone will.”
“I know that,” said the man, pulling on a rope laced through the top of the bag and drawing it closed. “Cathy won’t be trapped in here with the others now. You did that. You did a great thing, Tommy. It’s too bad you won’t ever be able to tell anyone about it.”
“Why not?”
That grin one last time. “Do you think they’d believe you?”
I shrugged. “Probably not.”
“You’re quite the kid, Tommy. Maybe we’ll meet up again sometime.”
“That would be nice.”
He pointed back toward my house. “Your dad is going to get up in about five minutes to take a leak, and he’s going to look in on you afterward. It would be best if you were in your room when he does.”
I turned and looked at my house, then turned back to him. “I’ll be real quiet. I was quiet when I left. My mom’s a light—”
But he was gone.
* * *
I lost my mother to emphysema. I could do nothing to save her.
I lost my father to cancer. I could do nothing to save him.
They both suffered so horribly, and for so long.
I married. We had a little girl. She was born with hydrocephaly and died when the shunt operation didn’t work. She was six days old and left this world without even a name. I could do nothing to save her, could offer nothing in exchange for her life.
I lost my wife to suicide five months later. I’d suspected it was coming but could strike no bargain to keep her with me.
I see the man with a canvas bag often: in news footage of a traffic accident, in pictures taken of villages in starving countries, in crime scene photos where a child or several children were killed or tortured or beaten or died of neglect. He’s always in the background, waiting for everyone to leave so he can begin putting those broken ghosts back together. I never ask anyone else if they see him there because I know they can’t. Once, during a breaking news report about a local man who’d shaken his four-month-old son to death, I actually saw him wave at the camera and mouth the words, “Cathy says hi.”
My mother. My father. My daughter. My wife. Any one of them I could have saved had I not …
But I could ruin what’s left of my life with “Had I Not …” or “What if …?”
On those nights when it gets bad, when I hate myself for having been an impulsive child—or think that maybe he’d always known what was coming my way and just conned me because he couldn’t bear the thought of another child’s broken ghost being forever trapped in a state of perpetual loneliness within his canvas bag—when there’s nothing more I’d like to do than find him again and wrap my hands around his throat and just squeeze … it’s then that I remember what he told me: We are heading toward something so … so incredible, so beautiful so indescribably wonderful that when it at last happens, everyone will look back at all of the savagery, all of the starvation, all of the … disease and suffering and loneliness and fear and misery, and as one they will say: ‘It was worth it. To get here to achieve this wondrous thing … all of the pain and anguish suffered by every living thing since the beginning of time was worth it.’
I remember. And wonder if I’ll be around to see it happen. I know I won’t be, that I’ll be long gone and forgotten by then, but on those nights when it gets bad, I remember his words, I remember Cathy’s smile, and for a little while, I can forgive myself—at least until morning comes—and I can hope.
Sometimes it helps. Not much, but some.
And I fall asleep with the echoes of thousands of broken ghosts calling out from the bottom of a canvas bag.