Sometimes You Could See It
by Greer Ohlsson
The house faced the woods. That is how the story goes now, but once upon a time it went the house faced the street that ran the carriages to and from the train that ran through Lacombe, Louisiana. Back when the wide hallway was filled with travelers spending all their pocket change on food and board. Now you walk out the swollen wooden door, onto the flat, blue porch with no railing but four, huge columns and a white swing, reach out and touch the thick of the woods. Ninety years of woods. Woods that hold such black in their arms that fireflies can be seen during the day.
I lived in the Lacombe house with my mother, my father (usually), my two older sisters—Hilda and Genevieve, and Hilda’s son Wallace who was just a baby at the time. Wallace’s father—also Wallace, much like my father, was working out of town much of the time.
When you walked through the front door you’d see two large rooms on either side of the entryway, both covered in tall windows like a conservatory. The one to the right had a big, brick fireplace with bookshelves incased on either side, a hand-me-down sofa, and a television set with a thick, silver DVD player on top; the room on the left had a long, rectangular dining table that sometimes had a beautiful cloth draped over it where my sister would do her schoolwork.
One afternoon, my nephew Wallace and I were sitting at the table for I don’t remember how long when he got up; his little flap of dark hair like a lid opening as he ran to the window. His eyes fixated on the edge of the yard where the trees thinned off into a hollow. He pointed at nothing like it was something, “Buffalo Tooth!”
I get up. “What?”
“Buffalo Tooth on the horse!” He points and points like he’s poking holes in a fly jar. Hilda and Mom emerge from their tasks to gather behind us. “Wallace, what do you see? Vendela, what does he see?”
“A ghost,” My mom says, as though it were finite.
My nephew retreated, so I figured the ghost left. We went back to the table, leaving the grownups standing around confused.
“We’ll let you know if he comes back,” I say, dismissing them. I crouched my head down and whispered to Wallace, “Did you really see a man there?”
Wallace nods. “He’s always there, but sometimes you could see him.”
Later that week it stormed, and when it stormed Mom and Genevieve liked to go sit on the porch and dissociate on the swing until the old chains clinked loud enough to snap them out of it. I would sit on this tiny, red rocking chair that was older than me because the swing scared me the way it went past the porch when it swung back. I’d watch as they stared into the woods—eyes set and glazed like zombies. It was like they went someplace else, leaving me alone on that porch. Mom’s facial expression shifted back and forth, as if she were imagining a whole person in front of herself and they were arguing. Her own little ghost, I imagined. Eventually she caught eyes with me and jolted like I scared her by just being there. I wondered if that’s what Wallace meant when he said Buffalo Tooth was always there, but sometimes you could see him.
Greer Ohlsson is a writer and essayist from New Orleans, Louisiana with publications in Mulberry Literary and The Bangalore Review. She is currently working on a collection of creative nonfiction vignettes exploring girlhood through the post-9/11, post-Katrina South. You can follow her along on Tiktok @Theendisgreer for more literary follies.