As it’s the season for telling ghost stories, here’s mine. It’s a revision of a true story I told at a Moth story slam on the theme Magic. While I had committed my lines to memory, I had trouble reciting them in order. It was also more discursive that it should have been for a six-minute bit. I did not win first place. In fact, I came in last, but no matter; it was a good drill.
When I was 18, my grandfather set me on a path through life I never could have imagined following. And he did that, believe it or not, from beyond the grave.
I’ve always been a writer of some sort, and most of that writing — including this story — was done at a desk I inherited from my paternal grandfather, Charles Judson Dutton. He and his sweet wife Laura moved in with us when I was five and stayed for the rest of their lives, in private quarters upstairs with a bedroom, sitting room, and big cedar closet. The sitting room had dormer windows obscured by coleus planters. Bookcases lined the paneled walls, stuffed two-deep with books, plus a trunk full of eighteenth-century French erotic novels in the cedar closet that Charles had purchased in Paris and taught himself to read.
Also, in front of a Zenith television set sat a rocking chair for Laura and lounge chair for Charles. Dominating the room was his desk, which at four by seven feet could seat six for supper. Its fat knobby legs supported an expanse of well-oiled rosewood fronted by three large desk drawers with two more hung underneath.
Before it was a desk it was an old piano. Visualize Mozart playing an 18th-century spinet pianoforte in a frock coat and powdered wig. Now mentally tear out the innards of his instrument and replace the keyboard and strings with a set of drawers with brass pulls, and that’s what it looks like.
I call attention to the desk because it’s part of my life and because Charles wrote all his books, sermons, briefs, reports, articles, and letters at that desk on an Underwood typewriter with tobacco-stained keys. As he was by turns a lawyer, a minister, a state historian, and a parole officer, his output was pretty eclectic. As has been mine.
When Charles passed away I was in college. I was told the desk and the books were mine to dispose of as I saw fit. I left the desk with my folks until I had room for it. It’s been with me ever since, in seven different locations. I know what you’re thinking: must be a bitch to move that thing. Not really. The drawers pull out and each of the massive legs unscrews so that its carcass can be carried by two people.
As for his books — a couple of thousand I would say — I sold them to a dealer, except for a few I kept. Among them were the eighteen books my grandfather wrote, sixteen murder mysteries and two biographies. Some of the others were rare, but only one was special.
At 78, Charles suffered a fatal stroke on his way to bed. Several months later my parents asked their friend Jeanne, who claimed to have psychic powers, to conduct a séance in Charles’ study to contact his spirit. Jeanne was happy to oblige, and she, my parents, my grandmother and I gathered at a folding card table upstairs in Charles’ study, in front of his desk.
Charles had believed in psychic phenomena, including ghosts, which he wrote into several of his mystery stories. Still, I was dubious. But after some incantations, Jeanne said she felt a presence. Following spiritualist protocol, she told us to lay hands on the table as she asked it yes or no questions. She instructed it to tilt the table once for no, twice for yes.
When Jeanne asked if this was Charles J. Dutton she was addressing, a corner of the table tipped up and fell twice. Always the skeptic, I peered under the table for evidence of footsie but didn’t see any.
The table went on tilting, responding to questions I can no longer remember, except for the last one, along the lines of “will your grandson Geoff follow in your footsteps?” At that, the table tipped twice and kept on bucking and heaving. Jeanne told us to stand up, keeping our hands pressed to it. We did, and it jostled us toward a bookcase six feet away. When it got there, it banged a corner against a shelf and kept on clocking it until a book fell onto the floor. Then it stopped moving.
I picked up the book. It was “Van Loon’s geography; The story of the world,” by Hendrik Willem Van Loon, an illustrated volume published in 1937. Though I had browsed it once or twice, it had never enticed me. As far as I was concerned, geography was mostly catalogs of places and natural features. But there it was, in my hand, selected by its former owner, just for me.
To make a long story short, After college, I went on to study city planning in grad school. My advisor, an economic geographer, hired me as an research assistant and I wrote my thesis applying his methods to analyze urban growth trends. From there, I went on to develop software to map and analyze geographic data, setting me off on a fruitful career in geographic information systems that spanned thirty years.
Me, a geographer? Who could have known where some bumps on a wall would take me in life? Maybe my grandfather, but certainly not me.
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