Mr. Evans' Ghost.

by Jane Mitchell.

© July 1996

The cat gave the first clue about the ghost. Where ever he sat waiting, at front or back, if the door was unlocked, it creaked open just a little, and the cat pawed his way out.

"Cat's opened the door again," Mum would shout as a cold blast raked through the house. "Somebody close it." None of us imagined that a ghost helped the cat.

We were renting number three Vine when number ten came up for sale. It's easy for me to remember the numbers, every time we pass through the war time housing with Mum in the car, she runs through the list.

"There's the O'Donnells," she states. "Where we stayed on the top floor when we came to Canada. Not a stick of furniture, just the trunks. Not like these immigrants today, everything given to them."

The kids' eyes glaze over. I say, "I don't think immigrants have it good, Mum."

"And there's the flat on Bunting." She ignores me, rattling on through the past. "And down that street, that's number three, and there, you can't see it, is number ten." She gives a satisfied sigh. "The first house we owned in Canada. It was a steal, in good condition and such a low price. Stayed there 'til we built out by the canal. The land was all fruit trees then, miles and miles. All built up now."

Number ten's low price wasn't caused by the ghost. No one knew Mr. Evans had become one. The widow wanted to get away from the memories. Nothing spooky at all. The house was one of those tiny one stories built during and after the war. You know the kind. Gray stucco struggling not to turn into gravel. Solid, painted doors, scuffed wood floors and thick plaster walls. The smell of a gas stove. These days all those houses sport aluminum siding, but then only the occasional white frame house relieved the endless streets of pebble gray.

Mr. Evans was a ghost before he became one. Mrs. Evans trained all her life to be a widow. They had no kids. She cut the grass, painted the porch, worked at Tiger Knit. They never visited with the neighbours. He never left the house, except morning and evening; a gray shade, the fifties man in the gray flannel suit, off in his round blue Plymouth to whatever faceless office he worked in. His death was the most exciting part of his life, as far as anyone knew. Though he must have fought in the war.

Mrs. Evans had gone to get her hair done, like every Saturday morning. Right on the dot of nine, walking up the street, around the corner and over the crumbling bridge above the railway to Sue's Salon wedged in between the corner store and Ray's flowers on Gaston St. No Unisex in those days. The hairdresser's existed as the mystical place of women, the female equivalent of the barber shop, smelling of perms and perfume, full of family stories. Mrs. Evans came back, tight curls protected under her clear plastic rain hat, and into the house to find Mr. Evans dead, right where he dropped in the hall between the bedrooms and the living room. The ambulance came, lights flashing, and took him to the General. Though they must have loaded him in one door of the hospital, through Emergency and out the back to the hearse.

We moved in, not all of Mr. Evans moved out. A few suits hung in a basement closet beside our wringer washer. Some old tools and wood pieces lived in the unattached garage. A pile of long paid bills stuffed beside a stack of Reader's Digests remained on a shelf in the cement basement. A basket of machine bits. It always amazes me, the stuff people leave behind when they move. And, of course, instead of moving on, as they say, Mr. Evans got left behind as well.

We took possession of number ten in the dead of winter. I trucked the small things up the frozen sidewalk, the inside of my nose frosting if I closed my mouth, pulling and tugging on my wooden sled until my mittened hands almost froze to the red metal handle. Mum dug out a battered sauce pan and made cocoa to heat me up. If we walked through a cold patch in the hall where Mr. Evans had died, no one noticed. The open door chilled the house through the night and into the next day.

My little sister hated the change. Three at the time, she stayed with the neighbour who baby-sat her; a little white face plastered to their steamed front window, watching the rental truck and us move the furniture past her up the road.

Mum set up her icy room, the junior bed buried in warm gold wool blankets brought over with us on the boat from England, a blue rubber hot water bottle tucked in the middle of the stiff white cotton sheets. Claire took one look at her room and screeched. House flies buzzed between the window panes.

"Now, now. They're only flies," soothed Mum. "Woken out of their winter sleep."

She grabbed the bug bomb and sprayed the room into acrid disinfected coughing silence. The dead flies were brushed away. Claire was convinced to fall asleep.

The next morning she shrieked again. More flies buzzed.

"They must have laid eggs in the wall," decided Dad as Mum sprayed again. "Though with this cold they should be hibernating."

The flies kept reappearing, unstoppable; first every day, then every few days. Claire, as a child will, got used to them after awhile, lulled to sleep by the buzzing and missing them when spring came and Mum opened the screen to whoosh them out. By then we had noticed the other things.

Mum loves a wringer washer. She still uses one, bought new a few years ago. I can't imagine where she found it.

"Wringing the clothes and putting them out on the line, in the fresh air, is the best thing for them," she declares, the dryer we bought her sitting unused in a corner. It's implied that we don't do things properly when we throw another load into our automatic machines instead of stringing winter lines of well squeezed garments throughout the basement. Or better yet, using the outside to freeze dry the January underwear.

The row of Mr. Evans' suits waited for Mum every wash day. She would clomp down the steep wooden stairs, carrying the heavy basket of laundry. As she passed the open door to their closet, first the jackets then the pants would slip off their hangers and clump on the floor. Mum tsked at them, loaded the washer and hung the suits once again. The buttons seemed to smirk. The suits waited for her return to operate the wringer. At the sound of her step, with a sigh and a swish, half returned to the rough bottom of the closet.

"Bloody clothes," glowered Mum, but she rehung every one, the game beginning again.

Hot and muggy summer arrived, giving the lie to the myth of a frozen north. Mum trotted out the tale of the poor pale Brits sunstroked on their first visit to a Canadian beach. June bugs slammed against the screen doors. Moths found the sun of the porch lights and flared to ashes. Too hot to sleep, tossing in the heat, we heard the door open and footsteps walk along the hall.

"Hallo. Who's that?" muttered Dad, creaking out of bed. He inspected the house and found nothing.

"Just the house creaking in the heat," murmured Mum.

"Yeah, or old Evans telling us he's here," replied Dad.

"Hope he doesn't expect perfect dusting like Cromwell's mother when Aunt Ivy cleaned at the manor. No shadowy figure's going to examine my handiwork. His suits are pain enough," snorted Mum.

Immigrant to the core, my mother did the books for Dad's business and worked at various office jobs -- between our bouts of measles, mumps and chicken pox. She refused to spare housework time for the peculiarities of a ghost she suspected of sloth during his life.

"You'd think with this heat he could make himself useful and develop a cold spot," remarked Dad.

The next morning, the cold appeared as requested, right where Evans died. He couldn't help with the heat. The chill created shivers like a fever, the touch not the blow of an air conditioner but alien icicles down the back, your only desire to dart through it. Evans became an acknowledged part of the family, grasping an existence as another subject for Mum's tart tongue.

"I don't need it now, but you bloody well better return it before this afternoon," she snapped into the air when the can opener disappeared from its place in the drawer.

Evans also liked to steal the green Blue Mountain ashtray from the coffee table or the decorative shaker from the side board. What Mum could do to him, I never knew. Call in the minister for a rare Anglican exorcism? The man couldn't control the spirits, both liquid and religious, in his own life, let alone the ghost in our house. Yet, Mum's firmness worked. By the afternoon, the ashtray or the can opener or the Niagara Falls salt shaker would reappear, moved cross-ways or upside-down to show the ghost hadn't cared for her tone.

Mr. Evans bothered the TV. Dad loved any new machine or gadget, we became the first on the street with a set. It breaks my heart to think how my father died just before computers took off. He would have spent hours building one in the basement, just like he made our stereo and speakers.

We got two channels on the TV, three on a good night. Hamilton, Buffalo, and the CBC. The aerial on the roof tilted towards Buffalo and the best shows. In black and white, through the occasional fuzz and snow, we watched Captain Kangaroo, The Friendly Giant and the horrendous marionettes, Canadian Randy Dandy and American Howdy Doody. In the evening came Don Messer's Jubilee -- my sisters and I longed for Mr. Evans to hate that show -- Ed Sullivan's variety and the comic Red Skelton.

We could never watch all of Randy Dandy. Mr. Evans loathed it. Five minutes into the freckled cowboy's jerking, twitching adventure and the screen blew into snow. "Cut it out!" we yelled and the picture cleared, for a little while. Red Skelton never developed fuzz during his show, even in the foulest weather when the aerial bounced and banged against the roof. Red performed his routines and somewhere just beyond our hearing, Mr. Evans laughed.

My older sister got herself a wiry French Canadian boyfriend. Curly black hair, blue eyes, exotic Quebecois accent, I thought about developing a crush. Mum and Dad refused to approve, though they let her go out with him.

"Hop to it. Frog on the phone," teased Dad as she lunged for the receiver.

"Andre? What kind of name is that for a boy?" tutted Mum. "Don't think I'll come to one of those Catholic weddings."

"I'm not marrying him. We're going to the movies," muttered Kath. "Leave me alone." Mum snorted but they turned polite when Andre came to the door.

One night Mum and Dad left to bowl down at the Golden Wheel and Kath remained at home to baby-sit. Andre appeared at the door. She giggled and let him in.

"You're not supposed to have company when you're baby-sitting," I pointed out.

"Shut up," snapped Kath. She loomed over me. "And if you say anything to Mum or Dad..."

The threat lingered, unspoken and horrid. Andre and Kath sat on the couch, soon well into the necking. I slumped ignored on the floor watching, who else? Don Messer.

"Knock, knock. Who's there?" I thought to myself. "Don Messer." I imagined messing up Kath's perfect bouffant.

The front window whooshed up with a slam. Andre and Kath jumped apart. I laughed.

"Mr. Evans doesn't like you doing that," I smirked.

"Who?" asked Andre.

"Oh, the ghost of the man who lived here before us. He likes that window open," replied Kath in an off hand way as she got up and closed it. Andre's eyes grew large, then he shrugged it off.

"Yeah," he snorted and returned to kissing Kath.

The window flew up again. This time Andre really jumped. As he stared at the flapping curtain, a candle on top of the TV lit itself.

"Tabernac. I have to go." Andre scrambled up off the couch, grabbed his coat and rushed off into the night, never seen again.

"You rotten, stinking ghost," shouted Kath. "Mum put you up to this."

She stomped downstairs, grabbed a hammer and nails and slammed back up to the living room. Kath nailed the window shut.

"There. No more fresh air for you."

The candle guttered with a little sigh.

Mum simply smiled when I told her about it. Life carried on; the window nailed shut in winter, open in summer. Footsteps, falling suits just a part of life.

Dad's business prospered. We moved away from Vine to the bigger place in the country -- the suits sent to the Salvation Army, the window painted shut. I wondered if Mr. Evans would come with us. Night after night in the newly built house I waited, straining in the dark to hear his familiar, comforting footsteps in the hall. Mr. Evans had stayed behind. For a long time, the natural silence bothered me much more than past unnatural creaks.

I've often wanted to stop at number ten and ask the people living there, "Is your house haunted?"

The present owners have changed the front window from the old thick wood to one of the new self contained aluminum type that can't be opened. Maybe they tired of it rising by itself. They might have decided that the springs had become unfixable, ghosts don't appear to everyone.

But who needs people looking at you oddly and saying, "No" or "I don't think so," in an amused voice? Still, I bet the door eases open for someone else's cat.

Note: This story won first prize in the Necessary Fiction Short Story Contest, 1996.