DEMENT: A Texas Ghost Story

Chapter I

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The manor house squats at the end of a long dirt drive deep in the heart of the Piney Woods of East Texas, where great green conifers and hardwoods lurk around its borders, gathering the nerve to converge on the monstrous thing. In its youth Cotton Copse was a proper home, before being converted and renovated into a large bed and breakfast, and then twisted again. The sign posted at the end of the drive now, in 1979, reads: "Cotton Corner: Dementia Care and Hospice," but the house knows it's true name, its history of infirmity that cannot be erased. Its Frankenstein-like appearance reflects its constant alteration and reimaging. New wings and rooms grow as tumorous flesh out from the edges of the home, some more than three hundred years fresher than the rest. But the true beast still lurks in the middle of the conflagration. Perhaps it means one day to altogether devour the woods around it.

Perhaps it means to devour all.

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Doctor Dorothy Cobb puts the needle down on one of her mother's old Laurie London records. London's little voice pipes out of the speakers of the dusty record player and fills every inch of the cozy one-bedroom apartment with the sound of "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." Mama, lying in her beige care bed beside the player, begins to rap on her knee with her knuckles to the beat of the music. That little white boy can sing, Mama always used to say.

Doctor Cobb's Uncle Malcolm gave her the nickname "Dot" when she was a little girl, and it stuck. Malcolm was not really her uncle, but he worked with her father in the oil field and came around the house so often for meals that he became an honorary member of the family. After Dot's father passed and the shock and grief exacerbated the early onset of her mother's dementia, it was Uncle Malcolm who first noticed Dot's knack for tending to those who had difficulty tending to themselves. Having no children of his own, Malcolm spent what little savings he had on helping Dot through college. She studied to be a schoolteacher, as the options for a woman of color in those days were limited, but she took advantage of the opportunities afforded by her place at the college to delve into all the latest studies on dementia. It was here she first discovered the power of song to stir a dementia patient's early childhood memories. At graduate school, which she needed no help in pursuing, she studied how music could form a connection with individuals who had not been able to connect with anyone in years.

Dot sinks into her usual spot in the flat-cushioned wooden chair beside Mama, taking a drag from her favorite Blue Dragoon brand cigarette and running her fingers through the old woman's thin hair. The oxygen tank between the bed and record player hisses as Mama inhales deeply through the plastic mask over her face. She is hardly recognizable as the mother who raised Dot up from girlhood. That Mama had been full of fire and energy, never sitting still for more than a minute so long as there was something to be done. This Mama, on the other hand, is asleep more often than awake and often can hardly feed herself.

Still, though, beneath the oxygen mask and the mosaic of wrinkles and spots, Mama retains that hard, strong chin, those high cheekbones and that stern little mouth. For Dot, looking at Mama often feels like looking at a sunken reflection of herself, a funhouse mirror. They share the same tiny frame, the same deep brown skin, and the same shrewd, narrow eyes. Mama is still in there, Dot knows. She can see her. She just must squint sometimes.

Still absently stroking Mama's curls, Dot turns her attention the pile of mail teetering on the small wooden coffee table beside her chair. The letter that sits on top has already been opened and unfolded, read and reread. Dot takes it up again and gazes down at it through the thick spectacles perched on her little button nose, the ones everyone tells her make her eyes look inhumanly large. The return address on the envelope tells her that the letter came from some Podunk Texas town of which she has never heard. A plea for help. Dot receives plenty of them.