Be Not Afraid
by Michael Thomas Ford
“Take out all the yellow ones,” Mamaw says. “Put these in.”
She takes a box of Christmas bulbs out of the plastic grocery sack from the Dollar General and sets it on the kitchen table beside the tangled strings of lights I’m trying my best to work apart. They’re lined with green, blue, red, and yellow bulbs.
“What color do you want me to replace them with?” I ask her.
“Don’t matter,” she says, and takes a draw on the cigarette in her mouth. She blows the smoke out, and it settles over the table like smog. I wish she would quit, but she won’t, even though her cough has been getting worse and worse. She won’t go to the doctor anymore, either, because as she says, “He don’t know nothin’ I don’t already know.”
What she means is that she’s probably going to die before too long. Maybe not next month or even next year, but more likely than not she won’t be around to see me graduate from high school in two years. But that’s not something we talk about. Just like we don’t talk about what will happen to me and Pike if she does. With our parents gone, she’s the only relative we have. Since Pike is eighteen and technically an adult, I guess he’ll be in charge of taking care of things then.
Except that Pike is the one who needs taking care of, and I’ve been looking out for myself since I was twelve. As much as I love Mamaw—and I love her more than just about anything—she’s not exactly a caretaker, either. Most of the time, I feel like the only adult in the house, and I’m not even old enough to drive.
“Shouldn’t we be replacing the red ones?” I say. “I thought his eyes were red.”
Mamaw shakes her head, taps her ash into the empty Ale-8-One can beside her. “That statue they got over in Point Pleasant makes everyone think that,” she says. “Those Blenko glass eyes and all. But they’re yellow.” She pauses, takes another puff of her cigarette. “At least, they were when I seen him. I s’pose he might look different to different people.”
Him. What she means is Mothman. But we don’t say his name around here. Mamaw thinks it’s bad luck. One time, maybe a year after our parents died, I did say it, and she slapped my face so hard I couldn’t breathe for half a minute. I just stood there looking at her face all twisted up in anger and fear. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t call him. Not ever.”
Mamaw and Mothman have a history. She was five years old in 1967, the year the Silver Bridge linking Point Pleasant, West Virginia, with Gallipolis, Ohio [NOTE: Against all reason, this town name is pronounced gal-uh-police. NOT liss.], collapsed, a little more than a week before Christmas. Forty-six people died in the tragedy, including Mamaw’s cousin Elmer, who was driving a beer delivery truck across the bridge when it went down and dumped everyone on it into the Ohio River. (Continue Reading…)